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THE FJ.OUENCE OF LANDOJI 




WALTER SAVAGK LANDOR. 

From the Original Painlinf/ hij Charles Cari/ll Coleiimn. Frontispiece. 



THE 

FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

BY 
LILIAN WHITING 

AUTHOR OF "a STUDY OF ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING," " BOSTOK 

DAYS," "THE WORLD BEAUTIFUL IN BOOKS," "THE LIFE 

RADIANT," " THE WORLD BEAUTIFUL," ETC. 



" And thou, his Florence, to thy trust 
Receive and keep, 
Keep safe his dedicated dust, 
His sacred sleep." 



With Illustrations from Photographs 



BOSTON 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 

1905 



m 



I 36 n 3 



Copyright, 1S05, 
By Little, Brown, akd Company. 

^M rights reserved 
Published November, 1905 






THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 



TO 



OF 

ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BARRETT 
BROWNING 

WHOSE FRIENDSHIP ENFOLDED AND SUSTAINED THE 
LAST LONELY YEARS OF 

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 

AND WHOSE GENIUS HAS LEFT ITS IMilORTAL IMPRESS 
ON FLORENCE, THE CITY OF THEIR LOVE, 
THESE PAGES ARE INSCRIBED BY 

LILIAN WHITING 

Florence, Italy, May-days, 1905 



Each life converges to some centre 

Expressed or still : 
Exists in every human nature 

A goal. 

Ungained, it may he, hy a life's low venture, 

But then 
Eternity enables the endeavoring 
Again. 

Emily Dickinson. 



CONTENTS 



Page 

I The Florence of Landor 3 

II From Fiesole to Vallombrosa 41 

III The Dew of Parnassus 103 

IV Idyllic Hours in Florentine Saunterings . 145 
V The Dream of Rose Aylmer 201 

VI " Imaglntary Conversations " 221 

VII The Twilight of the Gods 259 

Index 319 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Walter Savage Landor Frontispiece 

From tJm original painting hy Charles Caryll Coleman 

Via Tornabuoni Pase 9 



J 



An Angel of the Tabernacle. Fra Angelica . . " 23 

Cypress Trees in the Grounds of Villa Landor . . " 41 

Villa Landor, from the Garden " 52 

Santa Croce * 71 

View from Villa Landor over the Fiesole Slopes . " 83 ' 

Dante Alighieri " 110 '^ 

From the portrait discovered in the frescoes of Giotto in the 
Bargello, Florence 

y 

Savonarola " 180 

From the statue by Pazzi in the Palazzo Vecchio 

Mercury " 194 ' 

From the bronze of Giovanni da Bologna 

Entrance to Grounds of Villa Landor .... " 221 

View of Fiesole " 254 ' 

View from the Grounds of Villa Landor . . . " 281 1. 

Entrance Hall, Villa Landor " 290 

Monument to Dante Alighieri " 309 

Stefano Ricci. Santa Croce, Florence 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 



Yon road I enter upon and look around ! 
I believe you are not all that is here ! 
I believe that much unseen is also here. 

Walt Whitman's " Song of the Open Bbad. 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

" Nothing that is shall perish utterly, 
• But perish only to revive again 

In other forms. . . . 
. . . The passion and the pain 
Of hearts, that long have ceased to beat, remain 
To throb in hearts that are, or are to be. " 

Longfellow, 

Florence, lying fair under the gleaming ame- 
thyst lights of the early spring days of 1821, 
with the old, gray tower of the Cathedral on the 
heights of Fiesole silhouetted against a brilliant 
sky, revealed herself like a dream of enchantment 
to the vision of Walter Savage Landor. For six 
years he had been living in Italy, sojourning in 
Como, Milan, Pisa ; and on his departure from 
the City of the Leaning Tower he wrote : — 

" I leave with unreverted eye the towers 
Of Pisa pining o'er her desert stream. 
Pleasure (they say) yet lingers in thy bowers, 

Florence, thou patriot's sigh, thou poet's dre*m ! " 

Entering Florence did he overtake that psy- 
chological moment that, somewhere and some- 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

time, lies in wait for every one ? Did he then 
take the first step on that " open road " whose 
atmosphere is pervaded by the joy of achievement, 
the fruition of beautiful friendships, which are the 
only true realities of life ? For was not this 
the open air in which all heroic deeds might be 
conceived, all great poems written ? However 
unconsciously, Landor was opening the most 
richly illuminated chapters of his life. Before 
him stretched away years freighted with pro- 
found significance. Down the long vista waited 
beautiful figures, — the forms of poet, painter, 
and thinker, as yet undiscerned in the distance; 
signals flashed to him unrecognized by his vision ; 
subtle vibrations thrilled the air, that had still 
not aroused his answering perception; all the 
fascinating possibilities of the Unknown were 
ready to spring to life and light at the touch 
of " the electric chain wherewith we 're darkly 
bound." New interests, new sympathies, ready 
at a touch to materialize into undreamed- 
of combinations and forces, lay latent out in 
this undiscovered country of the unpenetrated 
future. 

" The tapestries of Paradise 
So notelessly are made ! " 
4 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

The tapestries of life, woven out of threads invisi- 
ble to the eye after designs v^^hich have not pre- 
figured themselves, are made as notelessly as are 
those of the Paradise of which the poet dreams. 

Into that wonderful Florence, still vital with 
the color, the romance, the tragedy ; the pas- 
sionate exaltation and the passionate despair of 
the fifteenth century, was Landor entering. All 
this was a part of his unconscious inheritance. 
Florence thrills to-day with the tumult of the 
joys and the triumphs, the sorrows and the 
pathetic failures of her dead centuries, whose 
inner history is yet to be written. It awaits 
the seer who is the romancist, or the dra- 
matic poet who can flash the Rontgen ray, the 
radium light, through these ages of accumu- 
lated experience and unveil to the modern eye 
these mysterious conflicts between the forces of 
good and the forces of evil that have determined 
the present quality of Florentine life. 

The long, unknown years lay before Landor 
as the veritable Salle des Illusions, like that which 
was wrought out of fire and magic in the expo- 
sition of 1900 in Paris. 

There are really few things in life that one 
may so wisely cherish as his illusions. He may 

5 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

well be as willing to part with his delusions as was 
Hamlet to part with the society of Polonius ; 
but one's illusions are the annexation of fairy- 
land and of all the infinite possibilities which it 
rests with himself to transmute into the great 
realities. One endures, one achieves, by seeing 
that which is invisible. It is the law and the 
prophets. 

The Salle des Illusions of the Paris Exposition 
proved itself the most poetic attraction. It ap- 
pealed to human nature. Its charm lay in its 
dramatizing the extension into fairyland. Out- 
wardly the mechanism comprised only a small, 
octagonal salon, fitted up with a few pillars and 
arches and decorative electric-light designs in the 
ceiling, the walls lined with mirrors. In an ad- 
joining alcove was an electric keyboard on 
which an expert electrician played, and, presto ! 
at every touch of his fingers new successions of 
wonderful effects appeared. Every empanelled 
mirror became an endless vista reflecting and 
repeating indefinitely the pillars and arches and 
the bouquets of light whose colors changed with 
every breath in an " Arabian Nights " dream of 
enchantment. In the infinite distance stretched 
away pillared arch and stately tower, pillars that 

6 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

were all aflame in deep rose-red, with arches of 
alabaster and pearl ; innumerable bouquets of 
rare flowers floated in the air ; the arches were 
of emerald changing to gold, to turquoise, to 
silver gray, to amethyst ; and down those mar- 
vellous pillared halls, which had no existence save 
in Illusion, troops of dancers whirled and flights 
of tropical birds surprised the air. The land 
of faery, the scenes and the actors that never 
existed on sea or land, sprang into light and life 
and motion at the touch of the electrician on 
the keys. The Realm of Magic opened and 
beckoned one to enter. Never was there em- 
bodied a more vivid symbol of life than was pre- 
sented in this triumph of French genius, — the 
Salle des Illusions. One could not but read into 
it the significance that invests the gaze into fu- 
turity. As the touch of the electrician on the 
keyboard called into being all that bewildering 
phantasmagoria that fascinated the imagination, 
so a man's own touch on the subtle potencies of 
personahty ; on those attractions and repulsions 
that pervade the social atmosphere and dominate 
all its relations : his advances and retreats, his 
faiths and his doubts, — all that constitutes his 
impress on life, — summon before him those 

7 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

groups and attendant circumstances which he 
will encounter in his journey on into the 
unknown future. 

'' Allons ! after the great Companions, and to belong to 
them ! 
They, too, are on the road — they are the swift and majestic 
men — they are the greatest women." 

For Landor, indeed, the "great Companions" 
were on their way. What a note of truth was 
touched by Dickens when he said that the people 
whom we are to meet, and who are to meet us, 
are all approaching ; and what they are to do for 
our lives, and we for theirs, will all be done. 
There are " the beings born under the same star;" 
there are those who are to us as " merely the fur- 
niture of the world ; " but the relations in each 
case are as fixed and as unerring as those of 
the stars in their courses. "Any one watching 
keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots," 
says George Eliot, " sees a slow preparation of 
effects from one life on another, which tells like 
a calculated irony on the indifference or the 
frozen stare with which we look at our unintro- 
duced neighbor. Destiny stands by sarcastic 
with our dramatis personce folded in her hand." 

8 




VIA TORNABUONI. 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Destiny stood by as Walter Savage Landor 
entered Florence that April day and saw the 
Campanile, "a lily in stone," rising into the 
Italian sky, and the Veiled Figure, Destiny, 
held folded in her hand the dramatis personce 
of that wonderful Anglo-Florentine group who 
were destined, during the Landor period of 1821- 
1864, to leave a new impress upon the romantic 
atmosphere of this Flower of all Cities and City 
of all Flowers. 

The Florence of Landor differed little, in 
outward aspect, from the Florence of to-day. 
No annual influx of thirty thousand spring 
tourists, it is true, then made vocal the Via 
Tornabuoni with their conversational raptures, 
expressed almost as invariably in English as are 
any fragments of conversational interchange one 
may chance to hear on Fifth Avenue, as the 
tide of Florentine tourists loiters before window 
displays of Italian art, or pauses by the grim 
and massive walls of the ancient Strozzi palace 
against which a flower vendor piles his masses of 
roses and lilies and deep-hearted purple pansies. 
The narrow fourteenth-century streets were 
lined then, as now, with lofty sculptured palaces. 
The picturesque Piazza Trinita, which forms the 

9 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

connecting link between the Lung' Arno and 
the Tornabuoni, is still unchanged, and the 
tourist of to-day crosses it now, as then, to enter 
the busy, modern street of Florence, where the 
rush of Hfe is in strange contrast with the mediae- 
val waUs of the Palazzo Strozzi. In front of the 
Palazzo Buondelmonte is a granite column taken 
from the Thermes of Anthonin in Rome and 
given to Cosimo 1 by Pius IV. It was erected 
here in 1565, and in 1581 Francesco Ferruci (il 
Tadda) added the capital to the shaft and the 
Statue of Justice, which crowns it, sculptured 
of porphyry. Just opposite this column is a very 
ancient embattled palace, which was erected in 
the thirteenth century by the Spini family, who 
date back to the very founding of Florence, and 
who were active participants in all its life until 
late in the seventeenth century, when their name 
and estates were seized upon by the Tagnalia, 
from which family they passed to the Pitti. 
The arms of the Spini were a red shield with 
designs in gold. At the junction of the Via 
delle Vigna Nuova and the Via Tornabuoni there 
stood in Landor's day, as in our own, the old 
palazzo which Sir Robert Dudley, Duke of 
Northumberland, bought in 1613 from the 

10 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Rucellai and entirely rebuilt. Sir Robert was the 
son of Amy Robsart and the Earl of Leicester, 
as will be remembered, and as the Earl was the 
favorite of Queen Elizabeth, that sovereign did 
not allow his marriage to be recognized, and 
Sir Robert was not allowed to use his title in 
England. He was a brilliant man, rendering 
important services to navigation, but, being de- 
prived of his title, he left England and in 1612 
sought refuge in Florence, where he enjoyed the 
confidence and close friendship of Cosimo II, the 
son of Ferdinand o I, and the grandson of the first 
Cosimo. The marriage of Cosimo II with the Du- 
chessa Eleanora di Toledo was a brilliant event, 
and on the upper floors of the old Palazzo Vecchio 
they set up their household gods until, after the 
Duchessa purchased the Palazzo Pitti, their resi- 
dence was transferred to that Cyclopean edifice. 
The rooms which they occupied in the Palazzo 
Vecchio, with their richly inlaid cabinets, with 
sofas and chairs in scarlet brocade and tarnished 
gold, and with their richly decorated ceilings, are 
still shown to the visitor, who, after loitering 
away a morning in this haunting-place, seeks the 
covered passage-way that connects the Uffizi gal- 
leries with the Pitti palace and walks through it 

11 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

still in a dream of reminiscence. After the death 
of the Duchessa Eleanora, Cosimo married again, 
and the celebrated Prince Giovanni, the architect 
of the Capello di Medici, was the son of this mar- 
riage. Prince Giovanni and Francesco I were 
therefore half brothers, and during Francesco's 
reign he commissioned Prince Giovanni as Am- 
bassador to Venice to present the thanks of Flor- 
ence for the acknowledgment of Bianca Capello, 
and also sent him to Spain on the coronation of 
Philip III. Francesco married Johana of Austria, 
a sister of the Emperor Maximilian, but the ro- 
mance of his Hfe, his love for Bianca Capello, 
proved to be its tragedy also. The eldest child 
of Francesco's marriage with Johana of Austria 
was Marie (born in 1573), who became the 
Queen of Henri IV of France. 

After the death of his wife, Francesco inspired 
the murder of Pietro Buonaventuri, the husband 
of Bianca Capello, that he might marry his en- 
chantress, and they lived together for seven years. 
Their deaths occurred within less than forty-eight 
hours of one another in their villa at Poggio a 
Caino, both the victims of poison, given them by 
Cardinal Ferdinando, to whom the throne then 
passed. In 1589 he renounced his cardinal's hat 

12 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

and married Christine of Lorraine, and it was his 
eldest son, Cosimo II, who was the sovereign to 
receive Sir Robert Dudley and invest him with 
the title of Duke of Northumberland. The 
reign of Francesco was characterized by great 
devotion to poetry and art, and by the enrich- 
ment of Florence with many beautiful works. 
Ferdinando died on February 7, 1608, and to 
his successor, Cosimo II, is due the perpetual 
gratitude of all who know and love the Tuscan 
capital. For he was a noble and generous prince, 
with great wisdom in statecraft, gi'eat interest in 
the welfare of his people, and the most generous 
patron of the arts. It was he who called Galileo 
to Florence. The great astronomer, the seer in 
the mysteries of the universe, born in Pisa in 
1566, was, at the age of twenty-three, invited to 
a professorship in the university of his native 
city. He held this chair for twenty-eight years, 
until, in 1592, his advanced ideas precipitated 
upon him the usual fate of those who dare 
see and proclaim truth beyond that generally 
accepted. Galileo was forced to resign his chair 
and subjected to criticism as ignominious as it 
was ignorant. 

" The hero is not fed on sweets." 
13 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Personal martyrdom is the price not unfre- 
quently paid for devotion to truth. Yet progress 
is a law as irresistible as that of gravitation and 
always is it true that 

" . . . thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs. 
And the thoughts of men are widen' d with the process of 
the suns." 

Galileo, resigning his chair at Pisa, proceeded 
to Padua where he taught for twenty years, and 
where he made many of his most remarkable dis- 
coveries. He was called to Florence by Cosimo 
II. It was here that he published his book 
explaining the Copernican system, stating the 
movement of the earth around the sun, which 
the tribunal of the inquisition in Rome denounced 
as failing in reverence to the Bible. 

Galileo was condemned to the prisons of the 
inquisition, but the Pope finally commuted his 
sentence, establishing his residence in the gar- 
dens of Santa Trinita al Monte. The original 
letter written by the inquisitor of Florence to the 
archbishop informing him of Galileo's condem- 
nation, is still preserved in the Torre del Gallo, 
the tower from which the great astronomer 
made his observations. Milton visited him in 
1638. As is well known, Galileo died in 1642, 

14 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

and his tomb is in Santa Croce. His researches 
and inventions of the pendulum, of the hydro- 
static balance, the thermometer, the compass, 
and the telescope, together with his discovery 
of the law by which the velocity of falling 
bodies is accelerated, impressed the brilHant 
mind of Cosimo II, who did all in his power 
to protect the great scholar and diviner of the 
laws of the universe. 

Sir Robert Dudley found in this wise sovereign 
a friend who appreciated his vast treasures of 
learning, and Sir Robert, on his part, gladly 
served Cosimo and the Florentines, whom he 
grew to love and to regard as his adopted 
countrymen. Cosimo II married Maria Madda- 
lena, the daughter of the Archduke Carlo of 
Austria. They had eight children, of whom the 
second son became Cardinal Leopoldo (born in 
1617 and died in 1675), the noted patron of art 
and the founder of the great galleries of the 
Uffizi. Cosimo II died in 1620. Sir Robert 
Dudley lived on in Florence, in this old palace, 
until 1649, when he died and was entombed 
in the old church of San Pancrazio in an ad- 
joining street — a church whose origin is so 
remote that it was considered an old church in 

15 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

the eleventh century. So here at last rest the 
mortal remains of the son of the ill-starred Amy 
Robsart, and one reads " Kenilworth " again in 
Florence with renewed interest because of Sir 
Robert's life in this city. 

The rooms in Sir Robert Dudley's old palace 
are eloquent of the past. Great mirrors in their 
carved frames of heavy gilt ; sofas and chairs in 
rich brocade, faded and dim, and massive old 
tables — all these adorn the spacious salons, in 
none of which is there the slightest possibility of 
any heat. There are no fireplaces, and, as there 
are no chimneys, there cannot, of course, be 
stoves ; and when, in the winter of 1900, the 
Theosophical Society of Florence held its meet- 
ings in these salons, the difference between the 
essentials of existence required three hundred 
years ago, and required to-day was keenly per- 
ceived. For Sir Robert's furniture of the seven- 
teenth century left much to be desired in the way 
of ordinary comfort, and even the liberal oppor- 
tunities of surveying oneself in half a dozen im- 
mense mirrors did not compensate for the lack 
of any heat on a cold day when the keen winds 
swept down from the snow-crowned Apen- 
nines, or for the lack of a comfortable chair on 

16 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

which to sit while Hstening to Mr. Chaterjii's 
eloquence. Sir Robert's richly decorated ceil- 
ings loomed above the heads of the faithful who 
gathered in pursuit of Yoga, and Sir Robert's 
icy cold marble floors were beneath their feet. 
Could any American with the national apprecia- 
tion of the ludicrous have looked in, he would 
have keenly enjoyed the scene. In a vast and icy 
cold salon, with a marble floor and a lofty, deco- 
rated celling, its walls hung with red satin against 
which old Florentine mirrors and a few pictures 
of saints and madonnas gleamed, he would have 
discerned a little group of shivering men and 
women, their feet perched on very modern foot- 
stools and incased in fur overshoes while they 
drew their wrappings as closely as possible, and 
gazed upon the mobile, brilliant, responsive 
countenance of Mr. Chaterjii, on whose words 
they hung with breathless attention. 

The coat of arms of the Rucellai are still to be 
seen on the palace, — a silver lion on a red ground 
with waves of gold running over it. 

The story of the strange lives that have been 

lived in these old palaces, in the centuries gone 

from all save memory could be dramatized with 

little aid from the playwright's art. It is a story 

2 17 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

in perpetual sequence of the most impassioned 
human hfe that imagination can picture ; and to 
one who begins to turn backward the chapters of 
supreme emotions — of love and ambition ; of 
the revenge of man, and the retribution of fate ; 
of woman's infinite devotion and tenderness of 
love, and man's fierce, conquering, and daring 
deeds ; of midnight assassinations ; of lofty pur- 
poses and generous fostering of the arts, of 
learning, of statesmanship, and of the personal 
t5rranny and the torture of persecution in the 
name of the church ; the record in which every 
aspiration, every ambition, every passion known 
to humanity has arisen and spent itself in utmost 
intensity of appeal — a history is read before 
which all the romance of all the world beside 
grows pale. Who can tread the streets of the 
Florence of to-day and not feel the throb and 
the thrill of all these past centuries when the 
men and women whose tombs and monuments 
and palaces the tourist visits were abroad in 
these same streets and made the life of their 
day ? In fact, one becomes so enthralled in the 
magnetic spell of this impassioned past that he 
is half oblivious to the panorama of the hour. 
Other cities have wonderful histories, but only 

18 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Florence has her pages written in her streets. 
From the musical bells of Santa Maria Novella, 
awakening one at the heroic hour of five every 
morning, to the last serenade under the windows 
of some old palace at midnight, song and music 
are vibrating in the air. One sits down to write, 
but his thoughts are dancing to rhythmic melo- 
dies. The very atmosphere is entrancing, and 
he cannot hold himself to his task. All Flor- 
ence beckons him out for saunterings. He 
climbs those wonderful terraced hillsides, where 
one winds upward, seeing on either hand a 
wealth of roses clambering over gray stone 
walls, while far below is discerned the Duomo 
swimming in a sea of blue and silver haze. Gaz- 
ing upward, one sees old historic villas on the 
ascending curves,' and ancient Fiesole crowns the 
height overlooking all Florence. Far away, in 
shadowy outline, are the deep forests covering 
the hillsides of Vallombrosa. " Every street and 
terrace and piazza is peopled with the past ; and 
although this past is closely around one, yet is 
the present not less beautiful. The throngs that 
pass are the same in likeness as those that brushed 
against Dante or Savonarola ; the populace is 
the same bold, eager people, with eyes full of 

19 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

dreams and lips braced close for war, which wel- 
comed Vinci and Cimabue, and fought from 
Monte- Aperto to Solferino. And as you go 
through the streets you will surely see at every 
step some graciousness of the ancient time or 
some poetry of the present hour," writes a lover 
of Florence. 

No one, however, can live for any length of 
time in this fairest land on earth, where the opa- 
lescent lights drift over the purple hills and lin- 
ger on the silver gray of olive groves ; where the 
air is haunted by music and fragrant with the 
perfume of a thousand flowers ; where legends 
of the learning and the radiant energy of such 
figures as Cosimo di Medici and Lorenzo il Ma- 
gnificp still enchant the mind, — no one, indeed, 
who sees the Italian nature as typically inter- 
preted in Dante's startlingly vivid portrait of the 
human soul, can fail to deeply realize the poten- 
tial nature of Italy. The large intelligence, the 
marvellously impressive and plastic nature of the 
people, their sensitive susceptibility, their keen, 
swift sympathies, and their noble enthusiasms all 
point to a resurrection of all that is most glorious 
in the dramatic past, conjoined with all that is 
most sublime and ennobling in twentieth-century 

20 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

ideals. The very atmosphere of Italy is so 
charged with intellectual and spiritual vitality 
that the slightest disturbance of this general 
energy precipitates it into individual achieve- 
ment. It is the air of mental magnetism. This 
temperamental demand of the entire nation re- 
quires for its development and fulfilment larger 
and freer conditions than even the most ideal 
monarchy can offer. The reign of Humbert 
was one of the most unique and in many ways 
the most notable in the history of continental 
politics. His simplicity of life and integrity of 
purpose were not more marked than his unfail- 
ing kindness in every personal form. When a 
terrible pestilence ravaged Naples a few years 
ago it was the king who came among them, who 
ministered to the sick, who helped to bury the 
dead. Margherita was the warm patron of the 
arts and the friend of scholar and savant. Their 
court was distinguished for its refinement, its 
purity and simplicity, and for its recognition of 
all that makes for noble progress. 

Still, Italy — in the pervading feeling of the 
general people, signally expressed in a recent 
session of the Parliament in Rome by the great- 
est political leaders and statesmen of the hour — 

21 



flf;/ 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

(demands a larger freedom, a broader field of 
jaction for the inventor, the economist, the 
^statesman than even the liberal monarchy by 
'which the country is now controlled can offer. 
There was no revolution. King Victor Emman- 
uel II came to a peaceful throne. He justly 
bolds the confidence and respect of the nation. 
Still the trovatore della transizione is stirring 
in the quickening pulse beats, and a future awaits 
Italy when as a democracy she shall rise to the 
full heights of the splendor of the dreams of Maz- 
zini and Cavour ; when all her poetic and artistic 
and profoundly emotional susceptibilities shall 
be so reinforced by intellectual vigor, and by the 
magnetism of contemporary progress, that all that 
is greatest and noblest in the past shall meet and 
mingle and assimilate itself with all that is noblest 
and most enduring in the inspiring future. 

Unchanged, too, from the days of Landor in 
Florence is the ancient Palazzo Vecchio, — un- 
changed since the early sixteenth-century days 
when the gonfalonier Capponi had the mono- 
gram of Christ, invested with a glory, carved in 
a marble decoration above the principal entrance, 
and, in a last effort to conquer the Medici, the 
Florentines declared Jesus Christ to be the King 

22 




AN ANGEL OF THE TABERNACLE. Fra Angelica. 

In the Ufflzi Gallery, Florence. 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

of Florence and had the inscription Reoc Populi 
Florentini placed over the great doors, an in- 
scription changed afterward to that of Rex 
regum et Dominus dominantium. The splendid 
court of Arnolfo, through which one passes to the 
massive stone staircases ascending to the Sala 
dei Cinquecento, the Camera di Cosimo I, the 
Salotto di Clement VII, and other historic rooms, 
charm the twentieth-century visitor with the 
same splendid colonnade that delighted the eye of 
Cosimo il Vecchio. The Cappella de' Priori, with 
its ceiling by Ghirlandajo and its crucifix over the 
altar attributed to Ghiambologna, is precisely as 
it was when Savonarola celebrated here his last 
communion before his execution on that tragic 
day of four hundred years ago. The magnificent 
Duomo of Brunelleschi ; Santa Croce, the West- 
minster Abbey, the Pantheon, of Florence ; San 
Marco with its cloistered cells forever immortal- 
ized by the glory of Fra Angelico ; the ancient 
Church of San Lorenzo, - — these and other great 
landmarks of Florence presented to Landor the 
same aspect as to the tourist of to-day, save that 
the present fa9ade of the Duomo had not then 
been placed. 

Brilliant and remarkable were the group of 

23 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

people who were to leave their impress on the 
Florence of Landor during the forty years and 
more of his life in this city. Leigh Hunt, Lady 
Blessington, Francis and Julius Hare ; that quaint 
character, Mr. Kirkup ; the Trollopes, the Brown- 
ings, Isa Blagden, Lady Bulwer, Mrs. Anna 
Jameson, Emerson, Mrs. Somerville, the Haw- 
thornes, John Kenyon, Nathaniel Parker Willis, 
Mrs. Stowe, Margaret Fuller (Countess d' Ossoli), 
Frances Power Cobbe, Theodore Parker, Linda 
White (now Mme. Pasquale Villari), Kate Field, 
Sir Frederic Leighton, the Thackerays, Frederic 
Tennyson, Hiram Powers, George Eliot and Mr. 
Lewes, Mr. and Mrs. William Wetmore Story, 
Swinburne, and others came and went — or came 
and stayed, during these years of Landor 's life in 
Florence. 

It was in 1815 that he left Tours in France 
(where he had passed a year after his de- 
parture from England) for Milan ; later he had 
sojourned in Como, Pisa, and Pistoia, and he had 
been in Florence more than twenty years when 
(in 1843) Thomas Adolphus TroUope came, the 
Trollopes being for some time the guests of Lady 
Bulwer Lytton in the Palazzo Passerini, and 
later taking up their abode in the old Palazzo 

24* 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Berti, in the ominously named Via dei Malcon- 
tenti. It was a few years afterwards that the 
Brownings set up their household gods in Casa 
Guidi, so that Landor remains fairly the pioneer 
of the Anglo-Florentines whose fame has en- 
riched the Tuscan capital with even added glory 
and exquisite appreciation. Landor's first home 
in Florence was in the Palazzo Medici, but in 
1829 he found himself the possessor of the Villa 
Gherardesca, on the Fiesolean heights, a villa in- 
vested with an atmosphere of poetry and romance 
from being in the scenes of Boccaccio, and also 
closely associated with the haunts of Lorenzo il 
Magnifico and IMachiavelli. It is on a terraced 
plateau halfway up the height crowned by the 
ancient city of Fiesole, and is near the little ham- 
let of San Domenico. Leigh Hunt, writing of 
. this beautiful region, says : — 

" I stuck to my Boccaccio haunts as to an old 
home. My almost daily walk was to Fiesole, 
through a path skirted with wild myrtle and 
cyclamen, and I stopped at the cloister of the 
Doccia and sat on the pretty, melancholy plat- 
form behind it, reading or looking through the 
pines down to Florence." 

25 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Near the Villa Landor is an old palace with 
wide marble terraces and mysterious gardens 
dark with cypress ti'ces, which was the home 
of Cosimo il Vecchio and later of Lorenzo il 
Magnifico, who died in this villa. It dates back 
to 1658, and during the residence of Lorenzo il 
INIagnifico it was the favorite meeting-place of 
the Platonic Academy of Florence. Fiesole, on 
the summit, is invested with ti-aditions of Milton 
and Galileo ; and of this ancient city, whose 
name as Fttsulie is even mentioned by Sallust 
and Poly bins, Hallam wi'ote : — 

" In a villa overhanging the towers of Florence 
on the slope of that lofty hill crowned by the 
mother city, the ancient Fiesole ; in gardens 
which Tully might have envied, with Ficino, 
Landino, and Politian at his side, Lorenzo de- 
lighted his hours of leisure with the beautiful 
visions of Platonic philosophy, for which the 
summer stillness of an Italian sky appears the 
most congenial accompaniment." 

It was to his life in his new home, the villa 
so embowered in historic associations, that Lan- 
dor refers in the lines : — 

26 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

'* From France to Italy my steps I bent. 
And pitcht at Amo's side my household tent. 
Six years the Medicajan palace held 
My wandering Lares ; then they went afield. 
Where the hewn rocks of Fiesole impend 
O'er Doccia's dell, and fig and olive blend. 
There the twin streams in AfFrico unite. 
One dimly seen, the other out of sight, 
But ever playing in his smoothened bed 
Of polisht stone, and willing to be led 
Where clustering vines protect him from the sun. 
Never too grave to smile, too tired to run. 
Here by the lake, Boccaccio's fair brigade 
Beguiled the hours, and tale for tale repaid. 
How happy ! O, how happy had I been 
With friends and children in this quiet scene ! 
Its quiet was not destined to be mine : 
*T was hard to keep, 't was harder to resign." 

At the age of forty-six Landor was still in the 
prime of youthful maturity. His life had lacked 
settled purpose, however, and his unquestionable 
genius was almost fatally at the mercy of his 
erratic temper and incalculable moods. His 
marriage to a woman whose personal beauty 
was not accompanied by any corresponding gifts 
of mind or grace of heart brought to bear upon 
him a perpetually depressing influence of fric- 
tion and annoyance rather than any sustaining 

serenity and sweetness. Landor's grave defects 

27 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

of temperament were his own and in any case 
would probably have signally marred the full 
expression of his great genius ; but had his mar- 
riage been one to have given him sympathy and 
comprehension, there can be no question of the 
vivifying effect it would have exerted over his 
entire personal and artistic life. At this time 
Landor's " Gebir " and " Count Julian " had al- 
ready won him high rank in poetic art, and the 
damp walls of his lodgings in Pistoia had an- 
noyed him as they might ordinary folk who held 
no countersign for Arcady. He had already 
written one series of the unique "Imaginary 
Conversations," in which the incident of his visit 
to the Odeschalchi palazzo in Como, and that of 
the children in a cart in the Campo Santo of 
Pisa, were depicted, and he had embalmed in 
a quatrain his fantastic emotion on seeing, at 
Pistoia, a lock of the hair of Lucrezia Borgia, 
of which he wrote : — 

" Borgia, thou once wert almost too august 
And high for adoration ; now thou 'rt dust. 
All that remains of thee these plaits unfold. 
Calm hair, meandering in pellucid gold." 

The friendship between Landor and Southey 
had already existed for many years at the time 

28 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

that Landor took up his abode in Florence, and 
their correspondence was fairly a conversational 
companionship in which literary matters and the 
events of the day were discussed. " I am reading 
the stupendous poetry of Wordsworth," wrote 
Landor to Southey. " In thoughts, feelings, 
images not one among the ancients equals him, and 
his language (a rare thing) is English." Toward 
Byron, Landor held an intense personal animos- 
ity ; but he considered Byron a great poet, — "the 
keenest and most imaginative of poets." It was 
Byron's furious assaults upon Southey that 
aroused his indignation, and of this Landor 
said : — 

"While Byron wrote or spoke against me 
alone, I said nothing of him in print or conversa- 
tion ; but the taciturnity of pride gave way im- 
mediately to my zeal in defence of my friend. 
What I write is not written on slate ; and no 
finger, not of Time himself, who dips it in the 
clouds of years, can efface it. To condemn what 
is evil and to commend what is good is consistent. 
To soften an asperity, to speak all the good we 
can after worse than we v^ish, is that, and more. 
If I must understand the meaning of consistency 

29 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

as many do, I wish I may be inconsistent with all 
my enemies. There are many hearts which have 
risen higher and sunk lower at his tales, and yet 
have been shacked and sorrowed at his untimely 
death a great deal less than mine has been. 
Honor and glory to him for the extensive good 
he did I peace and forgiveness for the partial 
evH ! " 

Kate Field, writing of Landor, remarks that 
the friendship existing between Southey and 
Landor must have had much of the heroic ele- 
ment in it, for instances are rare where two 
writers have so thoroughly esteemed one another. 
Those who have witnessed the enthusiasm with 
which Landor spoke of Southey can readily im- 
agine how unpardonable a sin he considered it in 
Byron to make his friend an object of satire. 
Landor's strong feelings necessarily caused him 
to be classed in the tout ou rien school. Seeing 
those whom he liked through the magnifying- 
glass of perfection, he painted others in less bril- 
liant colors than perhaps they merited. Southey 
to Landor was the essence of all good things, and 
there was no subject upon which he dwelt with 
more unaffected pleasure. " Ah, Southey was 

30 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

the best man that ever lived. There never was 
a better, my dear, good friends, Francis and 
Julius Hare excepted. They were true Chris- 
tians ; and it is an honor to me that two such 
pure men should have been my friends for so 
many years, up to the hour of death," Landor 
would say. It was to Julius Hare that Landor 
dedicated his greatest work in the series of 
" Imaginary Conversations " — the " Pericles and 
Aspasia." 

Walter Savage Landor was bom in Warwick- 
shire, England, on January 30, 1775, and died in 
Florence, Italy, on September 17, 1864, looking 
back on more than seventy years of active literary 
work, for he won his first recognition as a poet 
when a youth of twenty. He was the son 
of Dr. Walter and Elizabeth (Savage) Landor, 
and as a boy was a pupil at Rugby ; entering 
Oxford in his early youth, when, after one year of 
college life, he was suspended for some infringe- 
ment of university laws. Instead of accepting 
an opportunity for reinstatement, he gave him- 
self up to the writing of " Gebir," which fairly 
mirrors the strong influence that Milton at that 
time had upon the youthful poet. The appear- 
ance of " Gebir " admitted him at once to at least 

31 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

a speaking acquaintance with the Immortals, and 
the autocratic " Quarterly Review " somewhat 
enigmatically pronounced it a poem which would 
do any reader credit to understand. " Gebir " was 
largely written in Latin at first, for, like Milton, 
Land or seems to have faii'ly thought and dreamed 
in Latin and absorbed into his own creative energy 
all its reinforced power and dignity. The reward 
of " Gebir " came to him, not merely in liberal 
measure of fair fortune and fame, but in a guise 
far more precious and enduring, — a friendship 
that entered as a golden strand into all his future, 
— that of Southey, who wrote of the poem a fine 
critique calling attention to its " miraculous 
beauties;" and Shelley (born four years after its 
first appearance) was absorbed and fascinated by 
this poem during his undergraduate years at 
Oxford. Coleridge and De Quincy read " Gebir " 
with appreciation. 

In one of the " Imaginary Conversations," 
that between Plato and Diogenes, Landor makes 
one of his characters say : " The great man must 
have that intellect which puts in motion the 
intellect of others," and his own is a striking 
instance of this power of communicating vital 
suggestion. 

32 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

" Quickened are they who touch the prophet's bones ; " 

and while Landor was too defective in serenity 
and exaltation of vision to be accorded rank 
among humanity's prophets, he was yet capa- 
ble of the loftiest magnanimity, the most gen- 
erous nobleness. He was richly dowered with 

" the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love." 

He gave unswerving loyalty to high ideals of 
liberty ; his nature was one of intense devotion to 
civic and national progress. Erratic as he was 
by temperament ; hable to manifestations of irri- 
tability that had little reason to exist, yet the 
" kernel of nobleness," as Margaret Fuller called 
it, was always present. " Great and even fatal 
errors (so far as this life is concerned) could not 
destroy my friendship for one in whom I felt sure 
of the kernel of nobleness," wrote Margaret in 
a private letter ; and in Landor's character this 
germ of nobleness made itself felt throughout 
his somewhat volcanic career. He was a poet for 
poets, and the glory of his art in verse was fairly 
paralleled by the matchless splendor of his prose. 
Swinburne characterizes his " Count Julian " as 
" the sublimest poem published in our language 
between the last masterpiece of Milton and the 

3 33 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

first masterpiece of Shelley,'* and reiterates that 
between the date of " Samson Agonistes " and the 
" Prometheus Unbound " no work in English 
poetry can be compared to this lofty tragedy. His 
genius was of the majestic order. In structural 
beauty his work is almost flawless. As a critic he 
was fairly a diviner of the inner motive as well as 
of the degree of excellence in the performance ; 
as, for instance, when in a private letter he wrote 
of Wordsworth : " Common minds alone can be 
ignorant what breadth of philosophy, what energy 
and intensity of thought, what insight into the 
heart and what observation of nature are requisite 
for the production of such poetry." 

The early Uterary experiences of Landor were 
not without their chapters of stress and storm. 

A critic in the " Monthly Review " accused the 
young poet of borrowing phrases " from our in- 
comparable Milton," to which Landor replied that 
his critic disgraced himself in thus betraying his 
own ignorance of Milton, as, had he been familiar 
with the immortal bard, he could not possibly 
have made the accusation. " I challenge him to 
produce any expression borrowed from Milton," 
wrote Landor; "... I devoutly offer up my 
incense at the shrine of Milton. Woe betide the 

34 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

intruder that would steal its jewels I It requires 
no miracle to detect the sacrilege. The venerable 
saints and still more holy personages of Raphael 
or Michael Angelo might as consistently be 
placed among the Bacchanals and Satyrs, be- 
striding the goats and bearing the vases of Pous- 
sin, as the resemblance of * Paradise Lost ' could 
bS introduced in ' Gebir.' " 

In 1802 Landor first visited Paris, caring, he 
said, for but two things in France, — to see 
Paris and to see Bonaparte. His enthusiasm 
for the leader of the French Revolution, who 
should galvanize into a new life decaying nations, 
underwent a sea change which crystallized into his 
lifelong conviction regarding Bonaparte. Landor 
recognized that Napoleon had " changed the sub- 
stance for the shadow of greatness," and his view 
accorded with that of Wordsworth, who wrote : — 

" I grieved for Buonaparte with a vain 
And an unthinking grief. . . . What food 
Fed his last hopes ? " 

To Kate Field, Landor, in his last years, spoke 
of Napoleon as one whp "fought without aim, 
vanquished without glory, and perished without 
defeat ; " and Miss Field wrote : " I looked with 

35 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

wonder upon a person who remembered Napoleon 
Bonaparte as a slender young man, and listened 
with delight to a voice from so dim a past." 

It was six years after Landor's return to 
England from his first visit to Paris that he and 
Southey met personally, and a letter from Southey 
dated April 9, 1808, thus refers to Landor : — 

" At Bristol I met the man of all others I was 
most desirous to meet, — the only man living of 
whose praise I was ambitious, or whose censure 
would have troubled me. ... I never saw any 
one more unlike myself in every prominent part 
of human character, nor any one who so cordially 
and instinctively agreed with me on so many of 
the most important subjects." 

Later Landor visited Spain, and soon after his 
return events put him in possession of Llanthony 
Abbey in Wales, where he Hved for some years, 
and where, in 1811, he met and married Julia 
Thuillier. Soon after their marriage Southey 
and his wife visited the Landors at Llanthony, 
" and he always had a satisfaction," records John 
Forster in his biography of Landor, " that Robert 
and Edith Southey were the first who shared his 
turret." 

36 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Unfortunately, family dissensions arose, and, as 
we have seen, Landor and his wife left England for 
France, when, after one year, they went to Milan ; 
and after their sojourns in that city, Como, Pisa, 
and Pistoia, they came to Florence, in which 
enchanted atmosphere the Ufe of the poet was 
destined to be passed, and where, in the little 
English cemetery, was laid all that was mortal 
of him "who sang the charms of Rose."^ 

The life of Landor extended over three gener- 
ations of poets among his own countrymen : 
the first contemporary group including Scott, 
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, De 
Quincey, Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt ; the second, 
Byron, Keats, and Shelley ; while the third 
included Tennyson, the Brownings, and Swin- 
burne. Within this extended panorama, how- 
ever, Landor seems to have had comparatively 
few close personal affiliations ; and " the Florence 
of Landor " is, to a good degree, simply that of 
the period of his residence in it, with some 
glimpses in the perspective of his time that 
describe certain phases of the Florence of to- 

1 One of the lyrics of Landor begins with the lines: — 

" The grave is open — soon to close 
On him who sang the charms of Rose." 

37 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

day ; rather than that of a city of which he was 
in any sense a personal centre. Lady Blessing- 
ton, who visited Florence four years after Landor 
had there established himself, conceived for him 
a warm friendship, and in her home he met 
Rachel, who, at that time, had not achieved her 
great fame. " Mile. Rachel took tea with Lady 
Blessington," said Landor to a friend afterward, 
" and was accompanied by a female attendant, 
her mother I think. Rachel had very httle to 
say, and left early, as she had an engagement at 
the theatre. There was nothing particularly 
noticeable in her appearance, but she was very 
ladylike. I never met her again." 

The beautiful Florentine life lay before him. 
Well might Landor have felt, with Whitman : — 

" Be not discouraged — keep on, there are divine things well 
enveloped ; 
I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than 
words can tell." 

From the Salle des Illusions of the future 
fascinating forms half revealed themselves, van- 
ishing again only to reappear in the advanc- 
ing years in unforeseen groups and undiscerned 
combinations, to lend a new charm to enchanting 
Florence. 

38 



" Of all the fairest cities of the earth 
None is so fair as Florence. 
. . . Search within, 
• Without; all is enchantment .' 'T is the past 

Contending with the present ; and in turn 
Each has the mastery." 

To see nothing anywhere but what you may reach it and pass it. 
To look up or down no road hut it stretches and waits for you — 

however long, hut it stretches and waits for you ; 
To see no heing, not God's, nor any, hut you also go hither. 
To see no possession but you may possess it — enjoying all 

without labor or purchase — abstracting the feast, yet not 

abstracting one particle of it; 

To know the universe itself as a road — as many roads — as 
roads for troubling souls." 



II 

FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

But what need I of pictures on my walls ? 
, Out of my window every day I see 

Pictures that God hath painted, better far 
Than RafFaelle or Razzi ; these great slopes 
Covered with golden grain and waving vines 
And rows of olives ; and then far away 
Dim purple mountains where cloud-shadows drift 
Darkening across them ; and beyond, the sky. 
Where morning dawns and twilight lingering dies. 
And then, again, above my humble roof 
The vast night is as deep with all its stars 
As o'er the proudest palace of the king. 

William Wetmore Stoby. 

On one of the picturesque hillsides between 
Florence and Fiesole is the Villa Landor which 
is said to have been built by Michael Angelo. 
The lawn before the villa is a large oval plot, 
guarded by solemn rows of stately, motionless 
cypress trees that stand like a double row of 
sentinels, spectral and sombre. A great gate 
with high, stone pillars opens into the grounds. 
From the west and the south side of the villa 
there are enchanting views of the Val d'Amo, 
with gem-like glimpses of Florence gleaming in 

41 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

the heart of the valley. The location is one of 
the choicest in the environs of Florence. The 
sunset panorama over the Arno, with the heights 
of Bellosguardo and San Miniato in the dis- 
tance ; the purple mountains, changing through 
all the hues of rose and violet shades, crowned 
with the ancient town of Fiesole from which 
an Etruscan tower looks down ; the luminous 
air, shimmering in a thousand opalescent lights, 
— contributed to form a poetic atmosphere in 
which Landor could dwell as in a majestic har- 
mony. Noble thought and lofty vision might well 
be the daily companions of one thus fittingly 
enshrined. " Milton and Galileo gave a glory to 
Fiesole even beyond its starry antiquity," wrote 
Leigh Hunt; "nor is there, perhaps, a name 
eminent in the annals of Florence with which 
some connection cannot be traced with the an- 
cient town." 

It was in 1831 that Landor, through the gen- 
erous kindness of an ardent admirer, Mr. Ablett 
of North Wales, came into possession of the 
" Villa Gherardesca," as it was then known. Mr. 
Ablett had more than once manifested his pro- 
found appreciation of the poet, and it was lie 
who gave an order to the sculptor Gibson for 

42 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

a bust of Landor, a copy of which he presented 
to him. Landor sent it to his sister in England, 
explaining that it was the gift of his " incompa- 
rable friend, Mr. Ablett." The gift of the bust 
was closely followed by the generous provision 
made by Mr. Ablett enabling Landor to pur- 
chase for his home an estate so delightful as the 
Villa Gherardesca. Landor accepted this good 
fortune with great pleasure and gratitude. It 
gave him a pied a terre which combined com- 
fort and convenience with that enchantment of 
beauty which the poetic nature craves as its 
environment. Under date of May 2, 1831^ 
Landor thus writes to his sister: — 

" The children were all sitting so comfortably 
round the fire on my birthday, that they spoilt 
my intention of writing to you that evening. . . . 
We have had six cold days, with snow upon the 
Apennines, and a Httle of it about half a mile 
from my villa. You will doubtless be curious 
to hear something of this villa in which I shall 
pass the remainder of my life. 

"Two years ago, in the beginning of the 
spring, I took a walk towards Fiesole with a 
gentleman settled in North Wales, Mr. Ablett. 

43 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

I showed him a small cottage with about twelve 
acres of land, which I was about to take. He 
admired the situation, but preferred another 
house very near it, with a much greater quantity 
of ground annexed. I endeavored to persuade 
him to become my neighbor. He said Httle at 
the time, beyond the pleasure he should have in 
seeing me so pleasantly situated : but he made 
inquiries about the price of the larger house, and 
heard that it was not to be let, but that it might 
be bought for about two thousand pounds. He 
first desired me to buy it for him : then to keep 
it for myself: then to repay him the money 
whenever I was rich enough, — and if I never 
was, to leave it for my heirs to settle. In fact, 
he refuses even a farthing of interest. All this 
was done by a man with whom I had not been 
more than a few months acquainted. It is true 
his fortune is very large; but if others equal 
him in fortune, no human being ever equalled 
him in generosity. 

" I must now give you a description of the 
place : the front of the house is towards the 
north, looking at the ancient town of Fiesole, 
three quarters of a mile off. The hills of 
Fiesole protect it from the north and northeast 

44< 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

winds. The hall is 31 ft. by 22, and 20 high. 
On the right is a drawing-room 22 by 20 ; and 
through it you come to another 26 by 20. All 
are 20 ft. high. Opposite the door is another 
leading down to the offices on right and left ; and 
between them to a terrace-walk about a hun- 
dred yards long, overlooking Valdarno and Val- 
lombrosa, celebrated by Milton. On the right 
of the downward staircase is the upward stair- 
case to the bedrooms ; and on the left are two 
other rooms corresponding with the two draw- 
ing-rooms. Over the hall, which is vaulted, 
is another room of equal size, delightfully cool 
in summer. I have four good bedrooms up 
stairs, 13 ft. high. One smaller and two ser- 
vants' bedrooms over these, 10 J ft. high. In 
the centre of the house is a high turret, a dove- 
cote. The house is 60 ft. high on the terrace 
side, and 50 on the other ; the turret is 18 ft. 
above the 60. I have two gardens : one with a 
fountain and fine jet-d'eau. In the two are 
165 large lemon- trees and 20 orange-trees, with 
two conservatories to keep them in winter. The 
whole could not be built in these days for 
£10,000. 

" I am putting everything into good order by 

45 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

degrees : in fact, I spend in improvements what 
I used to spend in house-rent : that is, about £75 
a year. I have planted 200 cypresses, 600 vines, 
400 roses, 200 arbutuses, and 70 bays, besides 
laurustinas, &c., &c., and 60 fruit trees of the 
best quahties from France. I have not had a 
moment's illness since I resided here, nor have 
the children. My wife runs after colds; it 
would be strange if she did not take them ; but 
she has taken none here; hers are all from 
Florence. I have the best water, the best air, 
and the best oil in the world." 



The Florentine sunshine glorified the days and 
Landor entered on the happiest and the most 
productive period of his life. The home was 
lovely with its wealth of flowers and the pictorial 
landscape for which every window made a frame. 
If " the ornaments of a home are," as Emerson 
says, "the friends who frequent it," the guests 
of Landor indeed illustrated this ideal. Leigh 
Hunt came ; Francis and JuHus Hare ; Lady 
Blessington, whose husband. Lord Blessington, 
had been one of Landor's nearest friends ; John 
Kenyon, the relative and benefactor of the 

46 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

Brownings ; Mr. Greenough, the American 
sculptor, and Emerson. A few years before, 
Landor had been the guest of Lord Blessington 
on his yacht, for a cruise from Leghorn to 
Naples. While there Landor visited the ruined 
temples at Paestum, finding them " magnificent ; " 
but "Grecian architecture does not turn into 
ruin so grandly as Gothic," he wrote to a friend. 
Lord Blessington's death in 1829 deprived Landor 
of one of his most congenial friends, and his 
pleasant intercourse with Lady Blessington con- 
tinued during the remainder of her life, a period 
of some eighteen years after his establishment in 
his Fiesolean home. It was to the Countess 
of Blessington that Landor wrote the lines: — 

'' Since in the terrace-bower we sate 

While Amo gleam'd below. 
And over sylvan Massa late 

Hung Cynthia's slender bow. 
Years after years have past away 

Less light and gladsome ; why 
Do those we most implore to stay 

Run ever swiftest by ! " 

In the enjoyment of those early days in Villa 
Landor, as the house now became known, the 
poet entered on what was fairly a vita nuova in 

47 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

his experience, of which a letter to his sister 
offers its intimations. " My country now is 
Italy," he wrote, " where I have a residence for 
Ufe, and can literally sit under my own vine and 
fig-tree. I have some thousands of the one and 
some scores of the other, with myrtles, pome- 
granates, lemons and mimosas in great variety." 

In the spring of 1834 Landor received a visit 
from Mr. Nathaniel Parker WiUis, then in the 
height of his youthful fame, who took from the 
poet a letter of introduction to Lady Blessing- 
ton in London. To Mr. Willis, Landor com- 
mitted the manuscript of the " Examination 
of William Shakespeare for Deer-Stealing" to 
convey to London, where it was published the 
following autumn. 

Lady Blessington's friendship and his own 
charm of personality insured to Mr. Willis a 
brilliant social recognition in London. His 
poems were widely read, and he was himself 
welcomed into a society of distinguished people 
in a manner most gratifying to an ardent and en- 
thusiastic young poet, keenly sensitive and deeply 
appreciative of the honor and of the enjoyable 
and sympathetic atmosphere which surrounded 
him. 

48 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

Leigh Hunt had been sojourning for some time 
in Pisa and in Genoa, and had fled to Florence 
as a refuge from the sorrows and disappointments 
that attended him. He became enamoured of 
Maiano, a Uttle hamlet on one of the Fiesolean 
hills, where he wandered dreaming of Boccaccio. 
He was apparently anticipating the sweet coun- 
sel of Longfellow in the lines : — 

'' If thou art worn and hard beset 
With sorrows, that thou would' st forget. 
Go to the woods and hills ! No tears 
Dim the sweet look that Nature wears." 

Boccaccio had laid the two scenes of his " De- 
cameron" on both sides of Maiano. The two 
little rivulets, the AfFrico and the Mensola, were 
metamorphosed into the lovers in his " Nimphale 
Fiesolano ; " and the deep ravine at the foot of 
the hill was the "Valley of the Ladies." Near 
at hand, too, was the Villa Gherardi, where Boc- 
caccio had lived. "Every spot around was an 
illustrious memory," wrote Forster. " To the 
left, the house of Machiavelli ; still farther in 
that direction, nestling amid the blue hills, the 
white village of Settignano, where Michael An- 
gelo was born ; on the banks of the neighboring 

4 49 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Mugnone, the house of Dante ; and in the back- 
ground, Gahleo's villa of Arcetri and the palaces 
and cathedrals of Florence. In the thick of this 
noble landscape, forming part of the village of 
San Domenica di Fiesole, stood the villa which 
had now become Landor's. The Valley of the 
Ladies was in his grounds ; the AfFrico and the 
Mensola ran through them ; above was the ivy- 
clad convent of the Doccia, overhung with 
cypress ; and from his iron entrance-gate might 
be seen Valdarno and Vallombrosa." 

Charles Armitage Brown, whose special title 
to literary immortality is in that he was the 
near friend of Keats, had at this time domiciled 
himself in the little convent of San Baldassare 
near Maiano, where Leigh Hunt, forsaking 
his first location in the Via delle Belle Donne 
in Florence, had established himself. Armitage 
Brown became the confidential friend of Landor, 
and the two, with Leigh Hunt, made up a con- 
genial trio. Together they rambled over the 
Fiesolean hills, calhng into life and light again 
the vanished forms of Boccaccio's "joyous com- 
pany." They watched the play of the twin 
streams, the Affrico and the Mensola, that 
wound through Landor's grounds. On a neigh- 

50 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

boring hill Machiavelli had at one time lived. 
Born in Florence, in the Via Guicciardini (in 
1469), the son of Bernardo Machiavelli, who 
married the famous Florentine poet, Bartolommea 
Nelli, he had, in later years, sought the Fiesolean 
hills as a refuge in his busy life, where, as Secre- 
tary to the Ten, as Ambassador to Rome and to 
France, he had been in the heart of Florentine 
activities. From Mr. Brown's windows in San 
Baldassare could be seen the blue hills of Setti- 
gnano, where Michael Angelo was born : and 
across the Mugnone rose the mountains of 
Pistoia. Florence lay " clear and cathedralled " 
below, and the convent of San Matteo, in Arcetri, 
where Galileo often visited his daughter, Maria 
Celeste, who had taken the vows of a religieuse, 
gleamed within the picturesque landscape. Leigh 
Hunt and Landor were on terms of most cordial 
intimacy, and Hunt describes Landor as " living 
among his paintings and hospitalities in a style 
of unostentatious elegance." He records his sur- 
prise at the limitations of Landor's library, and 
the incredible extension of his memory, which 
enabled him to carry a library in his mind. Hunt 
seems to have been deeply impressed by the 
scholarship and the original gifts of his host, 

51 



THE FLORENCE OF LAN DOR 

and sjiys : " Speaking of tl\e I^atin poets of 
antiqnity, I was struck witli an observation of 
liis, tliat Ovid was the best-natured of them all. 
Horace's perfection that way lie doubted. He 
said thftt Ovid had a greater range of pleasur- 
able ideas, and was prepared to do justice to 
everything that came in his way. Ovid was fond 
of noticing his rivals in wit and genius, and has 
recorded the names of a great number of his 
friends ; whereas Horace seems to confine his 
eulogies to such as were rich or in fashion and 
well received at court." Hunt regarded I^andor 
as a Latin poet " beyond elegance," and was sur- 
prised at the great vigor of his prose. " He is a 
man of vehement nature and great delicacy of 
imagination," said Hunt, "like a stormy moun- 
tain pine that should produce lilies." 

To Landor, Florence continued to grow inex- 
pressibly attractive. " If 1 can do nothing more 
ibr him," he wrote of his infant son, '* 1 will take 
care that his first Avords and first thoughts shall 
arise within sight of Florence." As his first 
springtime in Villa I ^andor came on he realized 
anew the enchantment of Florence in the golden 
INlay days. The dazzlingly blue skies gleamed 
through the transparent air over the rose-flushed 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

amethyst of the hills ; the UHes, the most won- 
derful roses — the glowing damask — the pale 
yellow of the Cloth of Gold, and the fragrant 
whiteness of orange blossoms, the resplendence 
of a myriad of flowers, made every turn and cor- 
ner rich in color ; while every street and piazza 
,were vocal with the song of strolling musicians. 
The moonlight nights enchanted him with their 
splendor, and the trio of friends often enjoyed 
long evening drives on the Lung' Arno, where 
they watched a thousand lights reflected in the 
river, and the blaze of brilliant stars above the 
dome of San Spirito and the heights of San 
Miniato. These years of Landor's life were rich 
in their intellectual activities. He was producing 
the " Imaginary Conversations," although the 
most brilliant one of them, "Pericles and Aspa- 
sia," was not written until 1835. The " Ode to 
Southey " and also an " Ode to Wordsworth " 
were written, with much other verse which was 
largely of a personal nature. 

In the May days of 1833 Emerson visited 
Landor in his rose-embowered villa, receiving 
from him the most hospitable welcome. At 
that time Horatio Greenough, the American 
sculptor, was living in Florence, having gone to 

53 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Italy from his Cambridge (Massachusetts) home 
in furtherance of his art. It was Mr. Greenough 
who conveyed to Emerson Landor's invitation 
to dine with him ; and of the visit Emerson 
wrote in after years : " I found him noble and 
courteous, living in a cloud of pictures at his 
Villa Gherardesca, a fine house commanding a 
beautiful landscape." 

Emerson added : — 

" I had inferred from his books, or magnified 
from some anecdotes, an impression of Achillean 
wrath, — an untamable petulance. I do not 
know whether the imputation were just or not, 
but certainly on this May day his courtesy veiled 
that haughty mind, and he was the most patient 
and gentle of hosts. He praised the beautiful 
cyclamen which grows all about Florence ; he 
admired Washington ; talked of Wordsworth, 
Byron, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher. To 
be sure, he is decided in his opinions, likes to 
surprise, and is well content to impress, if possi- 
ble, his English whim upon the immutable past. 
No great man ever had a great son, if Philip and 
Alexander be not an exception ; and Philip he 
calls the greater man. In art, he loves the 

54 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

Greeks, and in sculpture, them only. He prefers 
the Venus to everything else, and, after that, 
the head of Alexander, in the gallery here. He 
prefers John of Bologna to Michel Angelo ; in 
painting, RafFaelle ; and shares the growing taste 
for Perugino and the early masters. The Greek 
histories he thought the only good ; and after 
them, Voltaire's." 

Emerson declared that Landor "pestered" him 
with Southey, and asks : " But who is Southey ? " 
The Concord sage recorded his recollections of 
this visit in further detail in regard to break- 
fasting with Landor: — 

" He invited me to breakfast on Friday. On 
Friday I did not fail to go, and this time with 
Greenough. He entertained us at once with 
reciting half a dozen hexameter lines of Julius 
Caesar's ! — from Donatus, he said. He glorified 
Lord Chesterfield more than was necessary, and 
undervalued Burke, and undervalued Socrates ; 
designated as three of the greatest of men, 
Washington, Phocion, and Timoleon. ... I 
had visited Professor Amici, who had shown me 
his microscopes, magnifying (it was said) two 
thousand diameters ; and I spoke of the uses to 

55 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

which they were appUed. Landor despised ento- 
mology, yet, in the same breath, said, the ' sub- 
hme was in a grain of dust.' I suppose I teased 
him about recent writers, but he professed never 
to have heard of Herschel, not even by name.'' 

It was twenty-three years after this visit (in 
185G) that Emerson pubhshed this reference to 
Landor in his volume called " English Traits," 
and it aroused the \'ehement protest of his host. 
" Your ' English Traits ' have given me great 
pleasure,' wrote l^andor to Emerson, " and tliey 
would have done so even if I had been treated 
by you with less favor. The short conversations 
we held at my Tuscan villa were insufficient 
for an estimate of my character and opinions. 
Twenty-three years ha\'e not obliterated from 
my memory the traces of your visit in company 
with that great man and glorious sculptor who 
was delegated to erect a statue in your Capital 
to the tutelary genius of America. ... I do pre- 
fer Giovanni di Bologna to JNlichael Angelo, who 
is sublime in conceptions but often incorrect and 
extravagant. ... I am sorry to have 'pestered 
you with Southey;' to have excited the query, 
* Who is Southey ? ' I will reply, Southey is 



FiiOM 1 lESOLE TO VALLOMiiROSA 

the poet who has written the most imaginative 
poem of* any in our time, — sueh is tlie ' Curse of 
Keharna.' Southey is the man who has written 
the purest prose." 

Lander's personal affeetions were so vehement 
that his friendship for Southey led him greatiy to 
overrate him as an artist. And yet, with this 
distant perspeetive of time, it is easy to see how 
a eertain mysterious strain in tlje poetry of 
Southey, half revealing itself and then slipping 
back into the under-world of magic, fascinated 
the imagination of Landor. 

Emerson's fancy in l^'lorence was chiefly caught 
by the JJuomo, of which he remarked that it was 
" set down like an archangel's tent in the midst 
of the city." 

A few years after this meeting of Emerson 
and Landor, (Charles Sumner visited Plorcnce, 
and by him P]imerson sent to Landor a gift of 
some books and a letter introducing the great 
Senator in which he emphasized the great " de- 
light and instruction " which he had derived 
from the reading of J candor's " Imaginary Con- 
versations," one or two instalments of which had 
then appeared. But Emerson always held of 

57 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Landor the opinion he expressed to Carlyle, that 
*' Landor's speech was below his writing." 

The proximity of the villa in which Lorenzo 
il Magnifico lived and died always fascinated 
the imagination of Landor, and contributed to 
the charm of his location. 

" Lorenzo was a man of marvellous variety and 
range of mental power," \\Tites John Addington 
Symonds. " He possessed one of those rare natures 
fitted to comprehend all knowledge and to sym- 
pathise with the most divine forms of life. . . . 
An apologist may always plead that Lorenzo was 
the epitome of his nation's most distinguished 
qualities, that the versatility of the Renaissance 
found in him its fullest incarnation. ... It is 
nevertheless true that Lorenzo enfeebled and en- 
slaved Florence. . . . He had not the greatness 
to rise above the spirit of his century or to make 
himself the Pericles of his Republic. In other 
words he was adequate, but not superior to Re- 
naissance Italy. This, then, was the man around 
whom the greatest scholars assembled, at whose 
table sat Poliziano, Landino, Marsilio Nicino, 
Leo Battista Alberti, Michael Angelo, Pulci and 
Giovanni Pico della JMirandola. The mere men- 

58 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

tion of these names suffices to awaken a crowd 
of memories in the mind of those to whom Ital- 
ian art and poetry are dear. Lorenzo's villas, 
where this brilliant circle met for grave discourse 
or social converse, have been so often sung by 
poets and celebrated by historians that Careggi, 
CaiFogiola, and Poggio a Cajano are no less famil- 
iar to us than the studious shades of Academe." 

The magnetism of all this scholarly atmosphere 
still lingers in the Florentine air. Landor, no 
less than other poets and men of letters who have 
loved Florence, must have felt its power, and not 
the less in that his home was fairly embowered in 
these regions of the Academe. " In a villa over- 
hanging the towers of Florence on the slope of 
that lofty hill crowned by the mother city, the 
ancient Fiesole, in gardens which Tully might 
have envied, with his chosen friends at his side, 
Lorenzo delighted his hours of leisure with the 
beautiful visions of Platonic philosophy, for which 
the summer stillness of an Italian sky appears the 
most congenial accompaniment," says Hallam. 
" As we climb the steep slope of Fiesole," writes 
John Addington Symonds, " or linger beneath 
the rose trees that shed their petals from Careggi's 

59 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

garden walls, once more in our imagination the 
blossoms of that marvellous spring unclose. 
While the sun goes down beneath the mountains 
of Carrara, and the Apennines grow purple-golden, 
and Florence sleeps beside the silvery Arno, and 
the large Italian stars come forth above, we re- 
member how those mighty master spirits watched 
the sphering of new planets in the spiritual skies. 
Savonarola in his cell below once more sits brood- 
ing over the servility of Florence, the corruption 
of a godless church, Michael Angelo, seated 
between Ficino and Poliziano, with the voices 
of the prophets vibrating in his memory, and 
with the music of Plato sounding in his ears, 
loses himself in contemplation whereof the after- 
fruit shall be the Sistine Chapel and the Medi- 
cean tombs." 

Fiesole is the most charming of features in all 
this surrounding landscape. Its ancient cathedral 
dates back to the time of Nero, when its first 
bishop, San Romolo, a convert and disciple of St. 
Peter, was sent with a special mission to preach 
at Fsesul^e, as the city was then known, and 
here, by the orders of Nero, the bishop was im- 
prisoned and killed with a dagger. In the centre 
of the town is a little piazza having the old cathe- 

60 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

dral on one side, while opposite is a museum in 
which are collected Etruscan relics. Not far be- 
low the summit of the hill are the walls of a 
Roman amphitheatre, some twenty or thirty feet 
high, with flights of steps cut in the solid rock 
still remaining. There are a few villas on this 
height occupied by English and American resi- 
dents, but for the most part the populace are the 
native Italians of the poorer class. Driving from 
Fiesole along the crest of the mountains, the 
view looking down on Florence in its wide valley 
is enchanting. There is a castle-villa, the Cas- 
tello di Vincigliata, crowning one height, that is 
filled with treasures of art. It was purchased in 
1855 by Mr. Temple Leader, an English gentle- 
man, who restored it in mediasval style. The castle 
is rich in artistic objects, among which are an 
Annunciation by della Robbia ; a Last Supper 
by Santo di Tito ; a vast collection of armor, and 
in the cloisters is an old well and a sarcophagus. 
The Platonic Academy came, later, to hold its 
meetings in the Orti Rucellai, in the old Via del 
Prato, by the invitation of Bernardo Rucellai, 
after the death of Lorenzo and the banishment 
of the Medici. The famous discourse of Machia- 
velli on Livy was given before this assembly ; 

61 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

and the eager audience, in which sat Leo X, 
listened also to Giovanni Rucellai, who read be- 
fore it the first Italian tragedy, " Rosamunda." 
The literary character of Uie Academy was 
changed in 1520 to a political one, and a con- 
spiracy was formed against the Medici and Car- 
dinal Giulio ; but the Rucellai, being friends of 
the Medici, opposed this scheme, and their palace 
and garden were therefore laid in ruins by the 
people ; and the remains, to-day, may be seen 
in the Castello di Vincigliata. On this drive, 
too, one comes upon Settignano, where Michael 
Angelo was born, — Settignano with its head- 
less statue covered with inscriptions. 

At San Salvi, a little farther on this beautiful 
drive on the hills looking down on Florence, is 
the old convent of San Salvi, in which is treasured, 
in the refectory, the noted Cenacolo of Andrea 
del Sarto, to which Mrs. Jameson assigns the third 
rank in art after those of Leonardo and Raphael. 

The old church of San Martino a Mensola, a 
gray, mediasval structure, is passed, and one re- 
calls a story told that runs : — 

" The church was restored by St. Andrew, the 
companion of St. Ornatus, the Irish missionary 

62 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

bishop of Fiesole. He established a monastery- 
near the church, where he died soon after his mas- 
ter, miraculously comforted on his deathbed by 
the presence of his sister, Bridget, whom he had 
left in Ireland forty years before, and in a glorious 
radiance of light, ' which drew all the people of 
Fiesole around him, as if summoned by a heavenly 
trumpet.' After his death Bridget lived in a her- 
mitage at Opacum, now Lebaco,high in the moun- 
tains, till her death in 870. The embalmed body 
of St. Andrew rests beneath the high altar. For- 
merly the holy water basin rested on a pedestal 
inscribed ' Help, Help, Ghod ' — a relic of the 
Irish St. Andrew's rule. Some ancient arches 
and several curious pictures remain in the church, 
which was restored by the Gherardi in 1450. 
The church in the Via del Margazzini at Florence 
was founded by St. Andrew in 786 in connection 
with St. Martino a Mensola." 

Ah I what a dream of enchantment it is to 
look from the encircling crest of these lofty hills 
towering above fair Florence, where the Val 
dArno is at moments suffused with an impalpa- 
ble blue haze, in which the vast Duomo, the pic- 
turesque tower of Palazzo Vecchio, the domes of 

63 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

San Lorenzo and San Spirito, and the aerial spires 
and battlements of Santa Croce seem swimming 
as in the blue sea. Across the valley rises the 
height of San Miniato, with its stately, noble cy- 
press trees and old terraces and bridges ; numer- 
ous massive villas and clusters of villages sparkle 
amid the terraced, tree-embowered heights sur- 
rounding this exquisite city ; the glass of the 
windows in loggias and roofs glitters like a million 
diamonds studding the landscape. 

The Torre del Gallo — Galileo's tower — is 
one of the objects pointed out on these hills, and 
it will be remembered that Milton alluded to it 
in the lines : — 

" The moon, whose orb 
Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views 
At evening from the top of Fiesole, 
Or in Valdamo, to descry new lands, 
Rivers, or mountains in her spotty globe." 

In " Pascarel," we find this most perfect and 
poetic description : — 

" He took me up the Star Tower of Galileo 
among the winding paths of the hills, with the 
gray walls overtopped by white fruit blossoms, 
and ever and again, at some break in their ram- 

64 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

parts of stone, the gleam of the yellow Arno 
water, or the glisten of the marbles of the city 
shining on us far beneath, through the silvery 
veil of the olive leaves. It was just in that love- 
liest moment when mnter melts into spring. 
Everywhere under the vines the young corn was 
springing in that tender vivid greenness that is 
never seen twice in a year. The sods between 
the furrows were scarlet with the bright flame of 
wild tulips, with here and there a fleck of gold 
where a knot of daffodils nodded. The roots of 
the olives were blue with nestling pimpernels and 
hyacinths, and along the old gray walls the long, 
soft, thick leaf of the arums grew, shading their 
yet unborn lilies. The air was full of a dreamy 
fragrance ; the bullocks went on their slow way 
with flowers in their leathern frontlets ; the con- 
tadini had flowers stuck behind their ears or in 
their waistbands ; women sat by the wayside ; 
singing as they plaited their yellow, curling 
lengths of straw ; children Msked and tumbled 
like young rabbits under the budding maples ; 
the plum trees strewed the green landscape with 
flashes of white like newly-fallen snow on Alpine 
grass slopes ; again and again among the tender 
pallor of the olive woods there rose the beautiful 

5 65 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

flush of a rosy almond tree ; at every step the 
passerby trod ankle deep in violets. 

" About the foot of the Tower of Galileo ivy 
and vervain, and the Madonna's herb, and the 
white hexagons of the stars of Bethlehem grew 
among the grasses ; pigeons paced to and fro with 
pretty pride of plumage ; a dog slept on the flags ; 
the cool, moist, deep-veined creepers climbed 
about the stones ; there were peach trees in all 
the beauty of their blossoms, and everywhere 
about them were close-set olive trees, with the 
ground between them scarlet with the tulips 
and the wild rose bushes. From a window a 
girl leaned out and hung a cage among the ivy 
leaves, that her bird might sing his vespers to the 
sun. Who will may see the scene to-day. The 
world has spoiled most of its places of pilgrimage, 
but the old Star Tower is not harmed as yet, 
where it stands among its quiet garden ways 
and grass-grown slopes, up high among the hills, 
with sounds of dripping water on its court, and 
wild wood flowers thrusting their bright heads 
through its stones. It is as peaceful, as sim- 
ple, as homely, as closely girt with blossoming 
boughs and with tulip crimsoned flowers now 
as then, when, from its roof in the still mid- 
66 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

night of far-off Fiesole Galileo read the secrets 
of the stars." 

Italy, that once imprisoned Galileo in chains, 
now reverences his name. The world usually 
stones its prophets and its saviours, but in the end 
the visions and the truth triumph and lend their 
exaltation and force to the onward progress of 
humanity. How sublime is the appreciation of 
GaUleo by Sir John Herschel, who said of the 
moment of his first discovery : — 

"What a moment of exultation for such a 
mind as his ! But as yet it was only the dawn 
of day that was coming ; nor was he destined to 
hve till that day was in its splendor. The great 
law of gravitation was not yet to be made known ; 
and how little did he think, as he held the instru- 
ment in his hand, that we should travel by it as 
far as we have done ; that its revelations would 
ere long be so glorious I " 

The drive from Florence to Fiesole passes 
near the Villa Palmieri, the home of INIatteo 
Palmieri, whose poem, " La Citta della Vita," 
inspired Botticelli to paint his "Assumption," 
which is to be seen in the National gallery in 

67 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Florence. It is this villa which Queen Victoria 
occupied in her visit to Florence in 1888. The 
road winds up beautiful terraces, with the silver 
gray of olive orchards gleaming under the purple 
cloud-shadows that flit over the hillsides, and 
the glow of tulips and the faint pink of almond 
blossoms contrast with the delicate green of the 
fields. 

From the terraced piazza in Fiesole is another 
of those marvellous views over the Val d'Ai-no, 
with Florence and other towns surrounded by 
white walls gleaming in the sunlight. In Fiesole, 
as in Rome, excavations are constantly being 
made, and new relics are coming to light. On 
the side of the hill toward Florence the scene 
is one never to be forgotten. Ruskin has vividly 
depicted it when he says : — 

" Few travellers can forget the peculiar land- 
scape of this district of the Apennine, as they 
ascend the hill which rises from Florence. They 
pass continually beneath the walls of villas bright 
in perfect luxury, and beside cypress hedges, in- 
closing fair terraced gardens, where the masses 
of oleander and magnolia, motionless as leaves 
in a picture, inlay alternately upon the blue sky 

68 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

their branching lightness of pale rose color and 
deep green breadth of shade, studded with balls 
of budding silver, and showing at intervals 
through their framework of rich leaf and rubied 
flower the far-away bends of the Arno beneath 
its slopes of olive, and the purple peaks of the 
Carrara mountains, tossing themselves against 
the western distance, where the streaks of mo- 
tionless cloud burn above the Pisan sea. The 
traveller passes the Fiesolan ridge, and all is 
changed. The country is on a sudden lonely." 

It is on these Fiesolan hiUs that Cimabue 
found Giotto, as a shepherd lad, drawing on a 
rock while he watched the sheep. The great 
painter, " who had already made the streets of 
Florence ring with joy," took Giotto to his home, 
where the boy became his most devoted pupil 
and his not unworthy successor. 

Not far above the piazza of Michael Angelo, 
one of the favorite resorts of the Florentines, is 
the Church of San Miniato, invested with legend 
and myth and association, one particularly strik- 
ing story being that of the founder of the Val- 
lombrosa monastery, who received, as he felt, 
the evidence of a miracle at this altar. The 

69 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

story runs that a wealthy and distinguished 
young Florentine noble, Giovanni Gualberto, 
had an only brother who was murdered, and 
he vowed vengeance upon the assassin. *' It 
happened that when returning from Florence 
to the country house of his father, on the even- 
ing of Good Friday," relates Mrs. Jameson, " he 
suddenly came upon his enemy alone and un- 
armed. Gualberto drew his sword. The mis- 
erable wretch fell upon his knees and entreated 
mercy, adjuring Gualberto, by the memory of 
Christ who had suffered on that day, to spare 
his Hfe. Struck with compunction, and remem- 
bering that Christ, when on the Cross, had 
prayed for his murderers, Gualberto stayed his 
sword, extended his hand, raised the suppliant 
from the ground, and embraced him." Proceed- 
ing on his way, Gualberto entered San Miniato 
and knelt before the altar, gazing at the crucifix 
before him. A sudden revulsion of feeling and 
repentance came over him, and he wept, suppli- 
cating pardon and mercy. The figure on the 
crucifix, in reply, bowed its head, and the miracle 
sank deep into his heart and changed the entire 
course of his Hfe. He sought and obtained ad- 
mission to the Benedictine order, took the vows, 

70 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

and became a monk in the monastery of San 
Miniato. Here for years he lived in humble 
penitence, and at last, on the death of the abbot, 
he was chosen to succeed him. Pere Gualberto 
declined, and betook himself to solitude in the 
shades of Vallombrosa, where he founded that 
order. 

The landscape from this beautiful height of San 
Miniato has been thus perfectly pictured by Mr. 
Harford : — 

" The view from San Miniato is best seen 
towards sunset. From an eminence, studded by 
noble cypresses, the Arno meets the eye, reflect- 
ing in its tranquil bosom a succession of terraces 
, and bridges, edged by imposing streets and 
palaces, above which are seen the stately cathe- 
dral, the Church of Santa Croce, and the pic- 
turesque tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, while 
innumerable other towers, of lesser fame and 
altitude, crown the distant parts of the city, and 
the banks of the river, which at length — its 
sinuous stream bathed in liquid gold — is lost 
sight of amidst the rich carpet of a vast and 
luxuriant plain, bounded by lofty Apennines. 
Directly opposite to the eye rises the classical 

71 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

height of Fiesole, its sides covered with inter- 
mingled rocks and woods, from amidst which 
sparkle innumerable villages and viUas." 

This panorama lies before the eye when linger- 
ing on the piazza of San Miniato. This church, 
like Santa Croce, is something of a campo santo, 
and it contains a chapel built by Michelozzo for 
Piero de' Medici. This chapel contains the 
miraculous crucifix of San Giovanni Gualberto, 
and there is also in it an exquisite marble screen. 
" Who that remembers Florence," says Leigh 
Hunt, " does not remember well the San Mini- 
ato alte' Monte, towering on its lofty eminence 
above the city, and visible along the Lung' Arno 
from the Ponte alle Grazie to the Ponte alia 
Carraja? — and the enchanting views of the 
valley of the Arno as seen from the marble steps 
of the ancient church — and the old dismantled 
fortress defended by Michael Angelo against 
the Medici ? — and the long avenue of cypresses 
and the declivities robed in vineyards and olive 
grounds between the gate of San Miniato and 
the lofty heights above ? " 

The David of Michael Angelo, on the piazza 
bearing the name of the great artist, is a colos- 

72 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

sal figure of the most free and majestic effect. 
There are stone benches placed so that the visitor 
may sit and gaze on the wonderful panorama. 
In the late afternoon the splendors of an Italian 
sunset burn in the western sky seen beyond the 
old Mozzi palace surrounded by groves. Across 
the valley is seen the purple line of the Carrara 
mountains and the dark slope of Mt. MoreUo. 
The beU towers in Florence catch the lingering 
rays of the sunset. The graceful spire of the 
Badia and the rich gleams of color on Giotto's 
tower irresistibly attract the eye, while from 
Santa Maria Novella the musical chimes float 
out on the evening air. 

Beyond the Porta Romana, concealed from 
sight by the curve of the hills, is the Certosa of 
the Val d'Emo, crowning a hill thickly covered 
with cypress trees. It is in the Certosa that 
Niccolo Acciajuolo, Grand Seneschal to Queen 
Joanna of Naples, and the founder of this con- 
vent, is entombed, beneath a recumbent statue 
clad in armor, above which is a rich Gothic 
canopy. It was Acciajuolo who, in 1341, founded 
the Certosa. Farther up the hills the visitor 
comes upon the wonderful shrine of La Madonna 
deir Impruneta. 

73 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Across the valley, at the foot of the heights of 
Bellosguardo, is the Church of San Francesco 
and San Paola, in which is the tomb of the 
revered Bishop of Fiesole, one of the most im- 
portant works of Luca della Robbia. "The 
admirably truthful figure of the dead bishop, clad 
in his imperial robes, is placed on a sarcophagus 
in a square recess, at the back of which are three 
figures, — Christ, the Madonna, and St. John," 
says Perkins, writing of the Tuscan sculptors. The 
faces of these figures are wonderfully impressive 
in strong individuality and solemn dignity. 

At times, while gazing upon the loveliness of 
the wide and varied landscape from the piazza of 
Michael Angelo, a silvery fog will envelop the 
entire valley, seeming to blend earth and sky in 
an aerial cloud, while a golden gleam of sunshine 
will suddenly light it up as with an exquisite 
transparency, and from this delicate, floating, 
wraith-like mist the summit of a distant hill 
flashes out, or the dark mass of a group of 
cypress trees, or the tower of some ancient chiesi, 
as if they were hung in the air and floating 
through it like the spectral forms of Paolo and 
Francesca in Dante's vivid picturing. One might 
dwell indefinitely on the unearthly loveliness of 

74 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

the environs of Florence with the sudden cloud 
effects, the ethereal mountain lines, with cascine 
and villa on the heights and the sloping hillsides. 
Florence is a smokeless city, and the atmospheric 
phenomena are thus seen in peculiar clearness and 
beauty. From the Via Lungo il Mugnone is a 
beautiful view of the Tuscan mountains, a height 
crowned by a convent — a massive, rambling 
structure of white stone, gleaming against the 
far blue sky, which marks the spot where St. 
Francis met St. Benedict. There is not a street 
corner, nor a hillside, nor a turn in the way in 
Italy that is not invested with legend and 
association running into the historic past, in 
a way, too, that lives again in the present. 
Florence was founded and developed by won- 
derful personaHties. For good or for ill, they 
stamped their impress on all time. This church 
was built in 1225 by the monks of St. Augustine. 
The piazza commands one of the most splendid 
and extensive views — from the Castentino moun- 
tains to the ranges of the Carrara. In the church 
is a Coronation by Piero di Cosimo dating back 
to the fifteenth century. 

On a wayside shrine on the Fiesolan road 
that winds up to Villa Landor is an inscription 

75 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

that tells all who pass that one Luigi Consago 
" felt God in his heart " as he walked these hills, 
and that the fields smiled on him with new 
meaning. A part of this runs : — 

"Su questi colli ore passeggiando giovinetto 
sentisti Iddio O Luigi Gonzaga piori grazia che 
in tanto reso della terra sicardi agli nomini il 
cielo." 

The excursion to Vallombrosa — on an emi- 
nence nearly three thousand feet above Florence 
— is one of the interesting things to make. The 
old monastery there was founded in 1050, and 
even the present buildings date back to the early 
years of the seventeenth century. 

In 1881 William Wetmore Story passed some 
time at Vallombrosa with a friend who had taken 
a deserted villa, — one built by the Medici, cen- 
turies ago, and used as a shooting box, — fitted 
it up as a summer home, and the sculptor thus 
described the panorama that lay before him : — 

" There, far away in the misty distance, can 
be seen the vague towers and domes of Florence ; 
and through the valley the Arno and the Sieve 
wind like silver bands of light through olive- 

76 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

covered slopes that lie silent in the blue, hazy- 
distance, spotted by wandering cloud-shades and 
taking every hue of changeful light from the 
pearly gleams of early morning to the golden 
transmutations of twihght and the deep intensity 
of moonlit midnight." 

Vallombrosa is the very Arcady of the poet's 
imagination. It has the isolation of a dream- 
world, a realm in which reminiscence and vision 
seem to meet; for memories of its consecrated 
past, prophecies of its alluring future, mingle in 
the atmosphere. It is an ideal spot for a poet's 
holiday, with no call of ordinary life and affairs 
to rudely interrupt his day-dreams. It is little 
wonder that a nature so essentially ideal as that 
of Story found here his Elysium; and in the 
Villa La^o di Vallombrosa^ the summer home of 
his daughter, Madame Peruzzi, he and Mrs. 
Story celebrated their golden wedding and passed 
there portions of many happy seasons. It was 
in this villa that Mr. Story wrote his idyllic 
romance, "Fiammetta," reading it aloud to his 
-wnife and daughter (as he notes in the preface to 
the little tale) "on three beautiful mornings 
as we sat under the shadows of the whispering 

77 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

pines. To you I dedicate it," he added, " with 
my truest love and in memory of those happy 
summer days in the Etrurian shades." 

During one of those Vallombrosan summers 
Tomasso Salvini was their guest, and there were 
long readings from the dramatic poets, and inti- 
mate conversational discussions of art and of the 
modern drama, as they sat under the murmuring 
pines, whose tops seem to almost pierce the sky. 
This, too, was the scene in which it was written 
that the sculptor should look his last on earth, for 
in October of 1895, Mr. Story died in the Villa 
Lago di Vallombrosa, and his body was conveyed 
to Rome and laid beside that of his beloved wife, 
in the little English cemetery where rests all that 
was mortal of Keats and of Shelley. 

The old church of Vallombrosa has one febject 
of singular interest to the visitor, — a silver 
reliquary, elaborately carved and chiselled, which 
is believed to contain the relics of San Giovanni 
Gualberto. There is also an Assumption, very 
much defaced by time, attributed to Frances- 
chini. Vallombrosa, in all its beauty and charm 
of association, is the most unique spot in all Tus- 
cany. Artists and poets seek its inspirations for 
creative suggestion ; the thinker and the seer are 

78 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

attracted to those shades which Milton loved and 

immortalized in the lines, — 

" Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks 
In Vallombrosa." 

The Abbey, founded in 1637, was once the most 
important one in Italy. It was a shrine of the 
perpetual adoration, and there was hardly an hour 
when prayer and praise were not ascending from 
the altar. This Abbey was also the home of 
learning and the conservator of art and science. 
When the Brownings first went to Florence 
(in 1847) they visited Vallombrosa and implored 
the monks to allow them to remain for two 
months, but at the end of five days they were 
sent away, as Mrs. Browning and her maid — two 
women — could not be permitted to sojourn in a 
monastery. " So provoking!" wrote Mrs. Brown- 
ing. " Such scenery, such fine woods supernatu- 
rally silent, with the ground black as ink. . . . 
But being ignominiously expelled, we had to 
come back to Florence to find a new apartment 
cooler than the old, and wait for dear Mr. 
Kenyon. Then we took up our journey toward 
Rome with a pause at Arezzo, and a longer one 
at Perugia, and planned to take an apartment 
over the Tarpeian rock and enjoy Rome as we 

79 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

have enjoyed Florence. More could not be. 
This Florence is unspeakably beautiful." 

It is more than a study of myth and mediaeval 
legend to live in Florence, and still one can hardly 
fail to preserve the relations between antiquity 
and modernity by becoming oblivious to the 
claims of the latter. When all is said that can 
be for Italy — and that is a great deal; for its 
infinite depths of historic interest ; its great per- 
sonages who lived and loved and suffered and 
sacrificed for its glory, and for what they held to 
be the glory of the divine truth ; for its enthrall- 
ing romance ; its atmosphere of enchantment — 
when all is said that can be for all its loveliness, 
it still remains true that one day in our own 
country is more significant than is a year under 
these fair skies. For Italy is the land where it is 
always afternoon. It is the land where time is 
not of the faintest consequence. The ItaUans, 
as a general rule, do nothing, and they so contrive 
the general mechanism of life that the stranger 
within the gates can do nothing either. The 
most disproportionate length of time is required 
for the smallest thing. 

In 1892 a funicular railway up the heights of 
VaUombrosa was constructed, and this should 

80 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

bring the historic height within an easy distance 
of an hour and a half, at most, from Florence, 
were transportation conducted as it is in America. 
The route now is by steam train from Florence 
to Arezzo, leaving it at Pontassieve, where the 
funicular railway road ascends the mountain. 
The journey by the steam train, which requires 
fifty-five minutes, could be easily made in Amer- 
ica within fifteen minutes, as it is hardly more 
than twelve miles. The cogwheel trip of the 
height requires almost as much time as it takes 
in Colorado to ascend Pike's Peak, which is a far 
greater distance. In our own country the excur- 
sion from Florence to Vallombrosa would be 
made so attractive and so easy that it would be 
a distinctive source of revenue to the railroad 
management, and incidentally to every one along 
the way, from the refreshment stands to the penny 
newspapers, while, on the side of the tourists, the 
excursion would be so delightful that they would 
throng the trains. It is true that the trip up 
Vallombrosa is no longer the penitential pilgrim- 
age that it was in the days of Landor ; but still 
the appaUingly early matutinal hour at which 
one must fare forth, and the late hour of return, 
make the day inevitably more fatiguing than is 

6 81 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

at all necessary for the little distance. To arrive 
at the point of exhaustion in a good cause may 
be counted aU joy ; but to be fatigued for no 
reason at all save that of the lack of adequate 
facilities is another matter. If only some enter- 
prising7 American would discover Italy, as a cer- 
tain enterprising Italian discovered America, and 
proceed to develop it into ways and means of 
modern life, what a delightful event it would be. 
" But you are so luxurious, you Americans," 
exclaims a long-expatriated American artist ; 
"we don't believe in so much self-indulgence." 
" But it is not self-indulgence at all," one pro- 
tests ; "it is simply means to an end, and that 
end is achievement. Why, we are doing things 
in America ! We take thousands and thousands 
of acres of arid land and we re-create it into blos- 
soming beauty and fertile production. We cross 
the continent of three thousand miles in four 
days, living, meantime, in a flying palace, but we 
do it for a purpose, and that purpose is not mere 
self-indulgence. We overcome time and space, 
— those two barriers, — and America is by no 
means merely the producer of wealth ; this wealth 
is expressing itself in universal education, in great 
universities, in great opportunities, great art." 

82 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

Florence — supposed to be a musical centre — 
cannot now compete with the great music of 
Boston, New York, Chicago, or even with musical 
opportunities in smaller Western cities. It can- 
not compete in modern painting or sculpture 
with America. Our wonderful architectural de- 
velopment, our marvellous feats of engineering, 
the greatness of life in general, as exemplified 
in America, finds no parallel in Italy. And this 
greatness of achievement requires conditions of 
comfort and convenience in order that one may- 
be physically equal to the great achievements. 
If the physical plane of life, the basis of all devel- 
opment, can be easily conquered by inventions 
and appliances, the energy that would otherwise 
need to be expended thereon is released and is free 
to apply itself to higher problems. 

George Eliot has recorded her opinion that the 
view from Fiesole is the most beautiful of any in 
the vicinity of Florence, but that from San Mini- 
ato, she adds " has an interest of another kind be- 
cause here Florence lies much nearer below and 
one can distinguish the various buildings more 
completely. . . . There is Brunelleschi's mighty 
dome, and close by, with its lovely colors not 
entirely absorbed by distance, Giotto's incom- 
es 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

parable Campanile, beautiful as a jewel." Mr. 
Longfellow's exquisite sonnet to this wonderful 
" lily of Florence " recurs to memory : — 

" How many lives, made beautiful and sweet 
By self-devotion and by self-restraint. 
Whose pleasure is to run without complaint 
On unknown errands of the Paraclete, 

Wanting the reverence of unshodden feet. 

Fail of the nimbus which the artists paint 
Around the shining forehead of the saint. 
And are in their completeness incomplete ! 

In the old Tuscan town stands Giotto's tower. 
The hly of Florence blossoming in stone, — 
A vision, a delight, and a desire, — 

The builder's perfect and centennial flower. 
That in the night of ages bloomed alone. 
But wanting still the glory of the spire." 

George Eliot and Mr. Lewes were the guests 
of Thomas Adolphus TroUope in the winter of 
1869-70, at his villa outside Porta San Niccolo 
at Ricorboli, where he had a small podere. The 
great novelist had previously visited Florence in 
the spring of 1860 and again a year later, her first 
visit being devoted to her studies for " Romola," 
which she wrote in London during the ensuing 
year. The spacious salon in Villa TroUope, on the 
Piazza Indipendza, where George Eliot copied 
her notes for "Romola," was later occupied by 

84 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

Mr. Thomas Hardy, during a visit to Florence. 
In the perspective of time since " Romola " was 
pubHshed it is interesting to read the author's 
own conception of that work, given in a private 
letter to Mr. R. H. Hutton, bearing date of 
August, 1863. " It is the habit of my imagina- 
tion," she writes, " to strive after as full a vision 
of the medium in which a character moves as of 
the character itself . . . My predominant feeling 
is — not that I have achieved anything, but — 
that great, great facts have struggled to find a 
voice through me, and have been only able to 
speak brokenly. That consciousness makes me 
cherish the more any proof that my work has 
been seen to have some true significance by minds 
prepared not simply by instruction, but by that 
religious and moral sympathy with the historical 
life of man, which is the larger half of culture." 
George Eliot passed the entire month of May 
in 1861 in Florence. "Our morning hours were 
spent in looking at streets, buildings and pictures," 
she records in her journal, " in hunting up old 
books at shops or stalls, or in reading at the 
Magliabicchiana Library." The Laurentian Li- 
brary {Libreria Laurenziana), that wonderful 
temple of learning designed by Michael Angelo, 

85 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

held a great charm for George EHot, who found 
it " resembUng a chapel with open pews of dark 
wood. The precious books are all chained to the 
desk," she notes, '* and here we saw old manu- 
scripts of exquisite neatness, culminating in the 
Virgil of the fourth century, and the Pandects, 
said to have been recovered from oblivion at 
Amalfi." 

From the cloistered terrace of the old church 
of San Lorenzo a door leads into the Laurentian 
Library whose real founder was Cosimo il Vecchio, 
the most munificent of Florentine patrons of art 
and letters. Vacchi, the historian, characterizes 
Cosimo as one " with displayed and manifest vir- 
tues, and secret and hidden faults, who made him- 
self head and little less than prince of a Republic 
which though free, yet served ; " and the great 
benefits he conferred by his dominant power of 
temperament led to the demand for his recall 
after his enemies had banished him. As will be 
remembered, Lorenzo il Magnifico was the grand- 
son of Cosimo il Vecchio and possessed in a strik- 
ing degree his characteristics. Cosimo's son, 
Piero, married Mona Lucrezia Tornabuoni, a 
woman of great learning and a poet of her day. 
Of this marriage there were three daughters, and 

86 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

two sons, Lorenzo, afterward known as il 3Iag- 
nifico, and Giuliano, — the two brothers whose 
tombs in the Capello Medici, the architectural 
masterpiece of Michael Angelo, and one of the 
special points of pilgrimage in Florence. Here 
are found those immortal figures of Michael 
Angelo, the symbolic statues of Day and Night, 
of Twilight and Dawn, whose replicas are familiar 
in every museum of art. Of these statues Rusldn 
wrote : " Four ineffable types, not of Darkness 
nor of Day, not of Morning nor Evening, but of 
the Departure and the Resurrection : the Twi- 
light and the Dawn of the souls of men." The 
figure of Death is invested with a grandeur that 
is indescribable and of the Dawn, John Bell has 
said that " the form is of the most exquisite pro- 
portions ; the head, a grand and heroic cast, and 
the drapery, which falls in thin transparent folds 
from the turban, is full of grace, while in her 
noble countenance a spring of thought, an awak- 
ening principle, seems to breathe, as if the rising 
day awaited the opening of her eyes. Day is 
much unfinished, little more than blocked out, 
most magnificent. Night in sleep and silence, is 
finely imagined, the attitude beautiful, mournful, 
and full of the most tender expression, the droop- 

87 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

ing head, the supporting hand, and the rich head- 
dress unrivalled in the art." 

Of these statues Giovanni Battista Strozzi 
wrote : — 

" La Notte che tu vedi in si dolci atti 
Dormire, fu da un Angelo scolpita 
In questo sasso, e perche dorme, ha vita ; 
Destala se nol credi, e parleratti." 

To which Michael Angelo replied : — 

" Grato m' e 11 sonno, e piu 1' esser di sasso 
Mentre che il danno e la vergogna dura ; 
Non veder, non sentir, m' e gran ventura : 
Per6 non mi destar, deh ! parla basso ! " 

One translation of these two stanzas thus 
runs : — 

'^ Night in so sweet an attitude beheld 
Asleep, was by an angel sculptured 
In this stone ; and, sleeping, is alive ; 
Waken her, doubter, she will speak to thee." 

Another translation of the Strozzi stanza 
(made by J. A. Wright) is as follows : — r 

" Carved by an Angel, in this marble white 
Sweetly reposing, lo, the Goddess Night, 
Calmly she sleeps, and so must living be ; 
Awake her gently ; she will speak to thee." 

88 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

The stanza by Michael Angelo has been thus 
translated : — 

" Welcome is sleep, more welcome sleep of stone 
Whilst crime and shame continue in the land ; 
My happy fortune, not to see or hear ; 
Waken me not — in mercy, whisper low." 

Mr. Wright has also translated this stanza in 
the following lines : — 

" Grateful is sleep, whilst wrong and shame survive ; 
More grateful still in senseless stone to live ; 
Gladly both sight and hearing I forego. 
Oh ! then awake me not ! Hush ! whisper low ! " 

Hawthorne was deeply impressed by the 
statue of Lorenzo il Magnifico, which in its en- 
tablature looks down forever, in the immortal re- 
pose of marble, on the figures of the Twilight and 
Dawn. Of the statue of Lorenzo, Hawthorne* 
says : " It is the one work worthy of Michael 
Angelo's reputation and grand enough to vindi- 
cate for him all the genius that the world gave 
him credit for. And yet it seems a simple thing 
enough to think of or to execute ; merely a sit- 
ting figure, the face partly over-shadowed by a 
helmet, one hand supporting the chin. . . . No 

1 French and Italian " Note Books." 
89 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

such grandeur and majesty has elsewhere been 
put into human shape. It is all a miracle, the 
deep repose and the deep life within it." 

George Eliot did not meet the Brownings 
during either of her two visits (in 1861-1862), 
but Mrs. Browning wrote in a letter to Miss 
Sarianna Browning, under date of June, 1860 f 
" Mr. Lewes and Miss Evans have been here 
and are coming back. I admire her books so 
much that certainly I shall not refuse to receive 
her." As a matter of fact George Eliot only 
met Mr. Browning for the first time some two 
years after the death of his wife. During all 
her sojourns in Florence, George Eliot seems to 
have lived largely the life of a student. She 
examined with great interest the collection of 
ivory work by Benvenuto Cellini in the Palazzo 
Vecchio, and the beauty of Orcagna's Loggia 
de' Lanzi grew upon her. The historic atmos- 
phere of this Loggia still fascinates the stu- 
dent of Florentine history, for here were the 
decrees of the government proclaimed to the peo- 
ple who thronged the Piazza della Signoria when 
the ringing of the bells in Palazzo Vecchio called 
them to assemble. Cellini's Perseus impressed 
George Eliot as fantastic, but the Ajax — an an- 

90 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

tique Greek sculpture, one of the most perfect ex- 
amples of Greek art — inspired her imagination. 
It is the Loggia de' Lanzi itself, however, with 
its vast and noble arches and vaulted ceiling, that 
especially arrests the visitor in Florence. The 
construction is the most beautiful blending of 
the Greek with the Gothic. The bronze group 
of Judith and Holofernes, the work of Donatello, 
was created for Cosimo Vecchio, and until 1694, 
it was in the private palace of the Medici ; and 
on their expulsion from Florence it was placed 
in the Loggia. 

The Piazza della Signoria is one of the most 
deeply impressive and suggestive of any in Flor- 
ence. Here, where now the Fountain of Nep- 
tune, surrounded by Tritons, stands, was the 
spot on which Savonarola and his two compan- 
ions were executed. At one corner, in an old 
palace, is a bas-relief, representing Christ, with 
the inscription underneath, " Omnis Sapientia a 
Domino Deo est,'' and on the fa9ade the Lily of 
Florence can still be discerned. It is hardly 
possible to contemplate the scene of this tragedy 
of more than four hundred years ago without 
recalling to mind the celebrated Pico della Mir- 
andola, who lived to be ninety-one years of age, 

91 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

and who was an enthusiastic disciple of Savon- 
arola. It was his influence that led Lorenzo di 
Medici to recall the celebrated monk when he 
was banished from Florence, and to appoint him 
preacher in the Duomo. 

Marsilio Ficino, in his biography of Pico della 
Mirandola, says that on a day when the door of 
the mystic temple, the Platonic Academy of 
Florence, lay open to all who could construe 
Latin, there was introduced into the study 
"where a lamp burned contiimally before the 
bust of Plato, as other men burned lamps before 
their favourite saints, a young man fresh from a 
journey, of feature and shape seemly and beau- 
teous, of stature goodly and high, of flesh tender 
and soft, his visage lovely and fair, his color 
white, intermingled with comely reds, his eyes gray, 
and quick of look, his teeth white and even, his 
hair yellow and abundant, and trimmed with 
more than the usual artifice of the time." 

Florence, as Renan has more than once pointed 
out, had a peculiar appreciation for Plato's philos- 
ophy, while other Italian cities inclined more to 
that of Aristotle. 

The early meetings of the Platonic Academy 
were held in the Villa Medici at Careggi, which 

92 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

dates back to 1417, when it was purchased by 
Cosimo il Vecchio, who died there in 1664 ; and 
in this village also occurred the death of Lorenzo 
il Magnifico. To the latter-day visitor there 
seems to be pictured in the very air the scene 
thus vividly described by Professor Pasquale 
Villari : — 

"Lorenzo on that day was more conscious 
than he had yet been that his death was near at 
hand. He had called his son Pietro to hini, to 
give him his parting advice, and bid him a last 
farewell. When his friends, who were not al- 
lowed to be present at that interview, returned 
to the chamber, and had made his son retire — 
as his presence agitated Lorenzo too much — he 
expressed a wish to see Pico della Mirandola 
again, who immediately hastened to him. It 
appeared as if the sweet expression of that be- 
nevolent and gentle young man had soothed him 
a httle, for he said to him, * I should have died 
unhappy if I had not first been cheered by a sight 
of thy face.' Pico had no sooner retired than 
Savonarola entered and approached respectfully 
the bed of the dying Lorenzo, who said that 
there were three sins he wished to confess to 

93 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

him, and for which he asked absolution : the 
sacking of Volterra ; the money taken from the 
Monte delle Fanciulle, which had caused so many 
deaths ; and the blood shed after the conspiracy 
of the Pazzi. While saying this he again be- 
came agitated, and Savonarola tried to calm him, 
by frequently repeating, ' God is good, God is 
merciful ! ' Lorenzo had scarcely left off speak- 
ing, when Savonarola added, * Three things are 
required of you.' ' And what are they, father ? ' 
replied Lorenzo. Savonarola's countenance be- 
came grave, and, raising the fingers of his right 
hand, he thus began : * First, it is necessary that 
you should have a full and lively faith in the 
mercy of God.' ' That I have most fully.' * Sec- 
ondly, it is necessary to restore that which you 
unjustly took away, or enjoin your sons to re- 
store it for you.' This requirement appeared to 
cause him surprise and grief; however, with an 
effort, he gave his consent by a nod of his head. 
Savonarola then rose up, and while the dying 
prince shrank with terror upon his bed, the con- 
fessor seemed to rise above himself when saying, 
' Lastly, you must restore liberty to the people 
of Florence.' His countenance was solemn, his 
voice almost terrible ; his eyes, as if to read the 

94 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

answer, remained fixed intently on those of Lo- 
renzo, who, collecting all the strength that nature 
had left him, turned his back on him scornfully, 
without uttering a word. And thus Savonarola 
left him without giving him absolution ; and the 
Magnificent, lacerated by remorse, soon after 
breathed his last." 

There is a legend in Florence that on the night 
of Lorenzo's death a train of lights flitted in the 
air between the Villa Medici and the Duomo, 
illuminating the city. 

Lingering day after day in San Marco and in 
other haunts of Savonarola, George Eliot seemed 
to assimilate fairly the spirit of his teachings 
and re-create them in her marvellous depiction 
of the character and life of Savonarola in her 
Florentine romance, "Romola." From the Frate, 
Romola learns the lessons of the higher wisdom. 
Savonarola is represented as saying to her : — 

" You are seeking your own will, my daughter. 
You are seeking some good other than the law 
you are bound to obey. But how will you find 
good ? It is not a thing of choice : it is a river 
that flows from the foot of the Invisible Throne, 

95 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

and flows by the path of obedience. I say again, 
man cannot choose his duties. You may choose 
to forsake your duties, and choose not to have 
the sorrow they bring. But you will go forth ; 
and what will you find, my daughter ? Sorrow 
without duty — bitter herbs, and no bread with 
them." 

And again : — 

" You would feel that Florence was the home 
of your soul as well as your birthplace, because 
you would see the work that was given you to 
do there. If you forsake your place, who will 
fill it? You ought to be in your place now, 
helping in the great work by which God will 
purify Florence, and raise it to be the guide of 
the nations." 

No biography of Savonarola or history of his 
period could offer so vital an interpretation of 
him in all his passion of piety and patriotism, as 
does George Eliot in these counsels that he is 
portrayed as offering to Romola. 

" The higher life begins for us, my daughter, 
when we renounce our own will to bow before a 

96 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

Divine law. That seems hard to you. It is the 
portal of wisdom, and freedom, and blessedness. 
And the symbol of it hangs before you. That 
wisdom is the religion of the Cross. And you 
stand aloof from it : you are a pagan ; you have 
been taught to say, * I am as the wise men who 
lived before the time when the Jew of Nazareth 
was crucified.' And that is your wisdom I To 
be as the dead whose eyes are closed, and whose 
ear is deaf to the work of God that has been 
since their time. What has your dead wisdom 
done for you, my daughter ? It has left you 
without a heart for the neighbors among whom 
you dwell, without care for the great work by 
which Florence is to be regenerated and the 
world made holy ; it has left you without a share 
in the Divine life which quenches the sense of 
suffering Self in the ardors of an ever-growing 
love. And now, when the sword has pierced 
your soul, you say, ' I wiU go away ; I cannot 
bear my sorrow.' And you think nothing of the 
sorrow and the wrong that are within the walls 
of the city where you dwell ; you would leave 
your place empty, when it ought to be filled with 
your pity and your labor. If there is wicked- 
ness in the streets, your steps should shine with 
T 97 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

the light of purity ; if there is a cry of anguish, 
you, my daughter, because you know the mean- 
ing of the cry, should be there to still it. My 
beloved daughter, sorrow has come to teach 
you a new worship ; the sign of it hangs before 
you." 

And how his devotion to Florence is revealed in 
these words to her : — 

** My daughter, you are a child of Florence ; 
fulfil the duties of that gi'eat inheritance. Live 
for Florence — for your own people, whom God 
is preparing to bless the earth. Bear the anguish 
and the smart. The iron is sharp — I know, 1 
know — it rends the tender flesh. The draught 
is bitterness on the lips. But there is rapture in 
the cup — there is the vision which makes all 
life below it dross forever." 

Among Landor's " Imaginary Conversations " 
is one between Savonarola and the Prior of 
Florence ; but the matchless vitality and power 
of George Eliot's intei-pretation of the person- 
ality of Savonarola, as given in " Romola," stands 
unrivalled and unapproached. 

The period of Landor's residence in Florence 
included a wide range of rich and choice liter- 

98 



FROM FIESOLE TO VALLOMBROSA 

ary production. Aside from the immortal poem, 
*' Aurora Leigh " and other great works of Mrs. 
Browning ; the " Christmas Eve " and " Easter 
Day " of Robert Browning, written in 1850 ; the 
many lyrics of both the married poets ; George 
Eliot's great Florentine romance, " Romola ; " 
the somewhat voluminous works of Thomas 
Adolphus Trollope ; the Italian Note Books of 
Hawthorne ; poems, essays, and history by 
many other authors; Landor's own greatest 
work, the "Imaginary Conversations," — in all 
these is preserved, as in amber, the literary 
spirit of the day, with phases of its life and inter- 
pretation of many of its great personalities. Not 
that all these creations were actually written 
in Florence : " Romola," was written in London ; 
** Aurora Leigh," begun in Florence, was con- 
tinued in Paris and completed in I^ondon ; but, 
largely, they all owed their inspiration to Tuscan 
airo And the glories of art in the galleries and 
the churches with legend and myth and poetic 
association, have been distilled by the alembic 
of literature from San Miniato to Fiesole, from 
Bellosguardo to Vallombrosa. 

99 



Only HO mw'.h do I know a» f have lived. . . . As the. world was 
plmtir. and. fluid in llir lianda of (Hod, .so is U ever to so muck of 
His aUrihules as we lirin^ lo it. To ignorance and sin il. is 
/lint : hut in proportion as a, man has anything in him divine, the 
Jirmament /lows he/ ore him and takes his signet and J'orm. . . . 
The day is always his who works in it with serenity and great aims. 

Kmichhon. 

How shall we know when he comes for whom are these garlands 

of hay Y 
How single him forth from the many thai pass and repass on their 

way ? 

Kasily may ye discern him,, and. heckon him forth fnnn the 
throng ; 

Ye surely shall know him hy this, — he hath slept on the moun- 
tains of .song. 

Know hy the dew on his raiment, his forehead, and clu.stering 

hair ; 
Dew of the night on Parnassus he for a token shall wear. 

EuiTii Thomas. 



Ill 

THE DEW OF PARNASSUS 

*' Lilied whiteness shone upon 
Not by light of moon or sun." 

Full of charm and brilliancy was the life of 
that inner circle in Florence with whom Par- 
nassus was familiar ground, whose social inter- 
ludes were enjoyed in that scenic Florentine 
background of incomparable beauty. There 
was some new excursion for every hour in the 
day. A happy party would fare forth for the 
old Boboli gardens and cKmb the little hill for 
the view over Florence and the Val d'Arno. 
There were moonlight gatherings on the terrace 
of some old palazzo, where Italian pohtics and 
poetry were discussed over tea and strawberries, 
or chance encounters in galleries or churches, 
where the conversational interludes of sympa- 
thetic companionship were resumed. 

Even in the Florence of to-day, as in that of 
Landor, the social life is one of such charm as to 
make Florence, from the point of the intimate 

103 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

view, something very different from the city of 
the mere tourist. To the latter, indeed, it is 
lovely enough to repay a journey thither — a 
thousand journeys ; but if to the infinite in- 
terest of its art and scenic effects one may be so 
fortunate as to add the still deeper interest of its 
social life, it becomes, indeed, the most fasci- 
nating of places. For in no city in the world 
is there more exquisitely cultured society than in 
Florence. It is a society of scholars, a society 
of the utmost accomplishment, a society includ- 
ing poets, artists, and thinkers. Its members are 
hnguists, equally at home in three or four of 
the modern languages ; they are people who 
have seen and know the best there is in the 
world — of society, art, and letters. 

The receptions given in Florence in these grand 
old palaces and historic villas might almost be 
stage scenes, set in perfection of beauty. The 
vast salons hung with tapestries, rich in sculp- 
ture ; the paintings in the heavily carved Floren- 
tine frames ; the great mirrors whose expanse in 
the past has reflected images and scenes long . 
since vanished ; with always a wealth of flowers ; 
with rare books and bric-a-brac, — all the name- 
less objects and details that contribute to the ar- 

104. 



THE DEW OF PARNASSUS 

tistic atmosphere of rooms, — in these vast salons 
the groups of people gather and seem almost like 
some pictm'es suddenly summoned by means of 
magic or necromancy out of the historic past. 
There is a resplendence of the golden atmosphere 
as of phantasmagoria, rather than the actual reahty 
of to-day. 

Among the earliest friends of the Brownings 
was Mr. Hiram Powers, the American sculptor, 
of whom Robert Browning speaks as " a most 
charming, straightforward, genial American, who 
sometimes comes and takes coffee with us, as 
simple as the man of genius he has proved himself 
to be." At this time Mr. Powers was domiciled 
in the Via dei Serragli, on the " other side " of the 
river, and was therefore quite near Casa Guidi. 
The Hawthornes were in the same street, almost 
opposite Mr. Powers, in the Casa del Bello, which 
Mr. Julian Hawthorne, in his biography of his 
father, describes as " a fresh and bright edifice 
... a house all light and grace," with a terrace 
extending on one side. A little farther up the 
street toward Porta Romana were the Torrigiani 
Gardens. At this time visitors to the studio of 
Mr. Powers were interested in his bust of Pros- 
erpine and in the statue of the fisher-boy hold- 

105 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

ing a shell to his ear, — a work which captivated 
the fancy of Mrs. Browning. The Casa Bello 
allured the Hawthornes with its spacious suite of 
rooms extending around the four sides of a small 
court, with lofty, frescoed ceilings and sumptuous 
hangings, and the usual Italian profusion of marble 
tables, mirrors, and upholstered furniture. The 
terrace was a constant delight to Hawthorne 
where he sat daily, — in what ethereal dreams who 
may tell ? 

" Ah ! who shall lift that wand of magic power 

And the lost clew regain ? 
The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower 

Unfinished must remain ! " 

The Brownings, Isa Blagden, and Mr. Powers 
and his family seem to have made the nearer 
circle for Hawthorne at this time. Mrs. Brown- 
ing somewhere chronicles that Mr. Story repre- 
sented Hawthorne as " not silent only by shjnness, 
but by nature and inaptitude, ... a man " who 
talks exclusively with his pen." But the records 
of these days, written in invisible ink, disclose, when 
chemically treated, that William Cullen Bryant 
and his daughter visited Florence about this 
time, and that Hawthorne, after calling on them 
at their hotel, passed an evening with them and 

106 



THE DEW OF PARNASSUS 

others at the Brownmgs', in Casa Guidi ; and that 
indeed, between Casa Guidi and Casa Bello the 
pathway was kept open. At one of Isa Blagden's 
weekly receptions Hawthorne met Browning, 
Trollope, and Frank Boott, and notes the " effer- 
vescent aroma " of Mr. Browning's genial conver- 
sation. Mr. TroUope he characterized as " sensible 
and cultivated." Isa Blagden was sometimes his 
companion in rambling about Florence, for Haw- 
thorne found the beautiful town to be a paradise 
for the saunterer, and he loitered on the Ponte 
Carraja, and at the opening between the houses 
on Ponte Vecchio that so frames a picture of river 
and palaces ; and there were few churches that he 
did not look into, though of all those the Duomo 
most appealed to him, because of the intense glory 
and beauty of the painted windows. " It is a 
pity anybody should die without seeing an antique 
painted window with the bright Italian sun shin- 
ing through it," he said. One late afternoon, 
especially, when the great writer had wandered 
into the Duomo, where, in the glass-encased 
space around the high altar, the priests and 
white-robed acolytes were chanting the after- 
noon service, he was fairly dazzled by the 
brightness of their wonderful windows, " like a 

107 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

million rubies, sapphires, topazes, and emeralds " 
massed together. 

Browning seems to have called frequently on 
the Hawthornes in Casa Bello, always leaving a 
new impression of genial grace and unaffected 
cordiality. 

There was one afternoon that seemed to sit for 
its picture when Mr. Hawthorne and Isa Blagden 
drove together to call on Mr. Kirkup, whose weird 
and curious personality constantly appears in all 
this grouping of Florentine visitors. " Such a 
tragic face the old man has, with his bleak, white 
beard," said Mrs. Browning of him. Mr. Kirkup 
was quite celebrated in his day as an antiquarian, 
to which he added the less enviable fame of being 
considered a necromancer. At all events, he was 
greatly interested in the "spirit rappings" of 
those days, the well-known medium, Hume, being 
then in Florence and holding seances, which 
attracted Mrs. Browning, the TroUopes, Haw- 
thorne, and others. Mr. Kirkup, indeed, enjoyed 
the luxury of keeping a private medium of his 
own in his house, — an Italian peasant woman, — 
through whose ministrations he beheved he held 
converse with Dante and with various dead kings 
and emperors. In an old palace overhanging the 

108 



THE DEW OF PARNASSUS 

Arno, Mr. Kirkup had domiciled himself close to 
the Ponte Vecchio, from whose outer portal a 
dark staircase led up to his rooms. Hawthorne, 
writing of his own and Isa Blagden's call on the 
antiquarian one summer afternoon,^ says : — 

" Knocking at the door we were received by 
him. He had had notice of our visit and was 
prepared for it, being dressed in a blue frock 
coat of rather an old fashion, with a velvet collar, 
and in a thin waist-coat and pantaloons fresh from 
the drawer, looking very sprucely, in short. . . , 
He is rather low of stature, with a pale, shrivelled 
face, and hair and beard perfectly white, with the 
hair of a particularly soft and silken texture ; his 
eyes have a queer, rather wild look, and the eye- 
brows are arched above them, so that he seems all 
the time to be seeing something that strikes him 
with surprise. . . . His whole make-up is delicate, 
his hands white and small, and his appearance 
and manners those of a gentleman. He appeared 
to be very nervous, tremulous, indeed, to his 
fingers' ends, without being in any way disturbed 
or embarrassed by our presence. 

" He ushered us through two or three large 
rooms, dark, dusty, hung with antique looking 

^ French and Italian Note Books. 
109 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

pictures and lined with book-cases containing, I 
doubt not, a very curious library. Indeed he 
directed my attention to one case, and said that 
he had collected these works in former days 
merely for the sake of laughing at them. They 
were books of magic and occult sciences. What 
he seemed really to value, however, were some 
manuscript copies of Dante, of which he showed 
us two : one a folio or parchment beautifully 
written in German text, the letters as clear and 
accurately cut as printed type ; the other a small 
volume, fit, as Mr. Kirkup said, to be carried in 
a capacious mediaeval sleeve. This also was on 
vellum and as elegantly executed as the larger 
one ; but the larger had beautiful illuminations, 
the vermilion and gold of which looked as 
brilliant now as they did five centuries ago. 

" Both of these books were written early in the 
fourteenth century. Mr. Kirkup has also a 
plaster cast of Dante's face, which he believes to 
be the original and taken fi*om his face after 
death ; and he has likewise his own accurate 
tracing fi:om Giotto's fresco of Dante in the 
Chapel of the Borgello. This fi'esco was dis- 
covered through Mr. Kirkup's means, and the 
tracing is particularly valuable. . . . It represents 

no 




DANTE ALIGHIERI. 

From the Portrait discovered in the Frescoes by Giotto, in the Bargello, Florence. 



THE DEW OF PARNASSUS 

the profile of a youthful but melancholy face, 
and has the general outline of Dante's features 
in other portraits. 

" Dante has held frequent communications with 
Mr. Kirkup through a medium, the poet being 
described by a medium as wearing the same 
"dress seen in the youthful portrait, but as bear- 
ing more resemblance to the cast taken from the 
dead face than to the picture from his youthful 
one. 

*' There was a very good picture of Savonarola 
in one of the rooms, and many other portraits, 
paintings, and drawings, some of them ancient, 
and some of them the work of Mr. Kirkup him- 
self. He has the torn fragment of an exquisite 
drawing of a nude figure by Rubens, and a 
portfolio of other curious drawings." 

Hawthorne and Mr. Landor never met. To 
accurately determine the matter the writer of 
this volume wrote to Mr. Julian Hawthorne, 
asking the question, to which he courteously 
replied : — 

"... My father never met Landor. He did 
not loom so large then as he does now — and my 
father never, that I know of, made a pilgrimage 

111 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

of piety to any living person. He was too mod- 
est to think himself an object of interest, and did 
not consider his own interest in any person a 
warrant to intrude upon them. 

*' Thanking you for your kindness, I am 
" very sincerely yours 

" Julian Hawthorne " 

The personality of Mr. Kirkup runs through the 
Florentine days from the time of Leigh Hunt's 
visit in 1823 to that of the death of Landor in 
1864, when Mr. Hunt was in Mariano, on the 
Fiesolan hills, where he looked from his window 
on the " Valley of the Ladies " of the " Deca- 
meron." Mr. Kirkup, Charles Armitage Brown, 
and Landor formed his intimate group. A little 
later came Hazlitt ; and it was Mr. Kirkup who 
introduced him to Landor, in the spring of 1825. 
" I perfectly remember Hazlitt's visit," said Mr. 
Kirkup in later years. " He wished to pay Lan- 
dor a visit, but was advised not, unless he was well 
introduced. Armitage Brown, who was Landor 's 
greatest friend here, offered him a letter ; but 
Hazlitt said he would beard the lion in his den, 
and he walked up to his house one winter's morn- 
ing in nankeen shorts and white stockings ; was 

112 



THE DEW OF PARNASSUS 

made much of by the royal animal ; and often 
returned — - at night ; for Landor was much out 
in the day, in all weathers." 

Mr. Kjrkup was the recognized authority on 
Dante, in his circle in Florence, and when Lan- 
dor published his " Pentameron," Mr. Kirkup 
took exception to the title of " Messer " as used 
by Landor. The complete title of the book is : 
" The Pentameron ; or Interviews of Messer 
Giovanni Boccaccio and Messer Francesco Pe- 
trarca, when said Messer Giovanni lay infirm at 
Viletta hard by Certaldo : after which they saw 
not each other on our Side of Paradise : shewing 
how they discoursed upon that famous Theolo- 
gian Messer Dante Alighieri, and sundry other 
Matters." Mr. Kirkup remarked that it was as 
much of an error for Landor to have alluded to 
Dante as "Messer" as it would be if some Itahan 
critic had called himself Sir Landor. " In all 
the legal documents I have of the sale of Peter 
Dante's estate he is called Dominus Petrus filius 
Dantii Allighierii : Dominus being the Latin for 
Lord or Messire, the title applied to a judge in 
the republic, while poor Dante is named as a 
common citizen in the same legal deeds in which 
his son is always styled Messire, or Dominus," 

8 113 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

added Mr. Kirkup. Mr. Forster, Landor's biog- 
rapher, in speaking of " The Fentameron," gives 
this pleasant Uttle picture of the way in which 
the work was suggested to Landor : — 

" I have spoken of the memories of Boccaccio 
that were on all sides of Limdor at his villa, from 
whose gate up to the gates of Florence there was 
hardly a street or farm that the great story-teller 
had not associated with some witty or affecting 
narrative. The place was peopled by his genius 
with creatures that neither seasons nor factions had 
been able to change. Happy and well founded 
was the prediction of his friend, that long before 
the ' Decameron ' would cease to be recited under 
their arching vines, the worms would be the only 
fighters for Guelph or Ghibelline ; and that even 
under so terrible a visitation as another plague, 
its pages would remain a solace to all who could 
find refuge and relief in letters. 

" Such a refuge and relief had they been to 
Landor in every plague by which he had been 
visited, and this book was payment for a portion 
of the debt. Boccaccio is its hero ; and the idea of 
it was doubtless taken from his letter to Petrarca 
accompanying the copy of Dante transcribed 
by himself for his use, inviting him to look more 

114 



THE DEW OF PARNASSUS 

closely into it, and if possible to admire it more. 
In his illness at Certaldo he is visited by his 
friend ; during interviews that occupy five several 
days, the Divine Comedy is the subject of their 
talk ; and very wonderful talk it is that can make 
any subject, however great, the centre of so wide 
a range of scholarship and learning and of such 
abounding wealth of illustration, can press into 
the service of argument such a delightful profu- 
sion of metaphor and imagery, can mingle humor 
and wit with so much tenderness and wisdom, 
and clothe in language of consummate beauty so 
much dignity and variety of thought. But amidst 
it all we never lose our interest in the simple and 
kindly old burgess of Certaldo and his belongings ; 
his little maid Assunta and her lover ; even the 
rascally old frate confessor, who suggests his last 
witty story : and not more delightful is the grave 
Petrarca when his eloquence is at its best, than 
in the quaint little scene where Assuntina has to 
girth up his palfrey for him." 

Mr. Kirkup recalled in his later years many 
characteristic anecdotes and events in Landor's 
early life, one of which was the termination of 
Landor's relations with the Villa Medici, where 

115 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

he first lived. " I remember one day," narrates 
Mr. Kirkup, " when Landor lived in the Medici 
palace, he wrote to the marquis, and accused 
him of having allured away his coachman. The 
marquis, I should tell you, enjoyed no very good 
name, and this had exasperated Landor the 
more. Mrs. Landor was sitting in the drawing- 
room the day after, where I and some others 
were, when the marquis came strutting in with- 
out removing his hat. But he had scarcely 
advanced three steps from the door when Lan- 
dor walked up to him quickly and knocked his 
hat off, then took him by the arm and turned 
him out. You should have heard Landor's shout 
of laughter at his own anger when it was all 
over, inextinguishable laughter which none of 
us could resist. Immediately after he sent the 
marquis warning by the hands of a policeman, 
which is reckoned an affront, and quitted his 
house at the end of the year." 

Nearly all Mr. Kirkup's life had been passed 
in Florence ; but when he was over eighty years 
of age he betook himself to Leghorn, where he 
died. Of his belief in the manifestations of 
spiritualistic phenomena by Mr. Home and by 
the Italian woman medium whom he kept in his 

116 



THE DEW OF PARNASSUS 

own house, Thomas Adolphus Trollope speaks 
somewhat at length in his reminiscences, and 
says that these phenomena convinced Mr. Kirkup 
of the existence of immortahty, in which he had 
not previously believed. Mr. Trollope^ also re- 
lates the following incident : — 

" My wife, my wife's sister, and myself had 
been spending the evening in the house of Mr. 
Seymour Kirkup, an artist, who, once well- 
known in the artistic world, lived on in Florence 
to a great age after that world had forgotten him. 
. . . Our visit Was to witness some of the me- 
dium's performances. . . ." The Trollopes felt 
sure that the phenomena they witnessed were 
manufactured fraudulently by the medium, " al- 
though," Mr. Trollope remarks, " we knew poor 
old Kirkup far too well to make any attempt to 
convict her." 

Mr. Trollope continues : — 

" But as we walked home, with our minds full 
of the subject, we said, ' Let us try whether we 
can produce any effect upon a table, since that 
seems the regulation first-step in these mys- 

1 " What I Remember." 
117 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

teries ; and, at least, we shall have the certainty 
of not being befooled by trickery.' So, on reach- 
ing home, we took a table — rather a remark- 
able one. It was small, not above eighteen or 
twenty inches across the top of it. But it was 
very much heavier than any ordinary table of 
that size, the stem of it being a massive bit 
of ancient chestnut- wood carving which I had 
adapted to that purpose. 

"Well, in a minute or two the table began 
to move very unmistakably. We were startled, 
and began to think that the ladies' dresses must 
have, unconsciously to them, pressed against it. 
We stood back therefore, taking care that noth- 
ing but the tips of our fingers touched the 
table. It still moved I We said that some un- 
conscious exertion of muscular force must have 
caused the movement, and, finally, we suspended 
our fingers about an inch or so above the sur- 
face of the table, taking the utmost care to 
touch it in no way whatever. The table still 
turned, and that to such an extent that, en- 
tirely untouched, it turned itself over, and fell 
to the ground. 

" I can only observe of this, as the little boy 
said who was accused of relating an impossibiUty 

118 



THE DEW OF PARNASSUS 

as a fact, * I don't say it is possible, I only say 
it is true I ' " 

Robert Browning's attitude toward all these 
curious manifestations that attracted so much 
attention in Florence in the early fifties is suffi- 
ciently indicated in his " Mr. Sludge : the Me- 
dium." Hawthorne records much of it in his 
" Note Books " and says that in all the numerous 
instances he still felt a sense of unreality. Mrs. 
Browning's attitude toward these phenomena 
that were manifested so persistently in Florence 
at this time as to attract the attention of all 
visitors, was one of intelligent discrimination 
rather than any foolish credulity or equally fool- 
ish denial of evident facts. " For my own part," 
she says, in alluding to her religious convictions, 
" I have thought fi:-eely on most subjects, but 
never, at any point of my life, have I felt myself 
drawn toward Unitarian opinions. I should throw 
up revelation altogether if 1 ceased to recognize 
Christ as divine. ... I have gone on predicting 
that the present churches were in course of dis- 
solution and would have to be followed by a 
reconstruction of Christian essential verity into 
other than these middle ages scholastic forms. 

119 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Believing in Christ's divinity, which is the Hfe 
of Christianity, I beheved this. ... I should 
fear for a revealed religion incapable of expan- 
sion according to the needs of man. What 
comes from God has life in it, and certainly from 
all the growth of living things, spiritual growth 
cannot be excepted. . . . As to the supernatural, 
if you mean by that the suspension of natural 
law, I certainly believe in it no more than you 
do. What happens, happens according to a nat- 
ural law, the development of which only becomes 
fuller and more observable. . . . Every fact is a 
word of God. We have to learn — we in the 
body — that death does not teach all things. 
Foolish Jack Smith who died on Monday is on 
Tuesday still foolish Jack Smith. If people 
who on Monday scorned his opinions prudently, 
will on Tuesday receive his least words as oracles, 
they very naturally do something as foolish as 
their inspirer is. . . . Hein ! ... if you are in a 
dungeon and a friend knocks through the outer 
wall, spelling out the words you comprehend, you 
don't think the worse of the friend in the sun 
who remembers you." 

Mrs. Browning and Mrs. Stowe discussed in 
a prolonged correspondence the problem involved 

120 



THE DEW OF PARNASSUS 

in these curious manifestations in Florence, and 
of Mrs. Stowe's convictions Mrs. Browning thus 
writes in a letter * to a friend : — 

" Mrs. Stowe had heard, she said, for the fifth 
time from her boy (the one who was drowned in 
that awful manner through carrying out a college 
jest) without any seeking on her part. She gave 
me a minute account of a late manifestation, not 
seeming to have a doubt in respect to the verity 
and identity of the spirit. In fact, secret things 
were .told, reference to private papers made, the 
evidence was considered most satisfying. And 
she says that all of the communications descrip- 
tive of the state of that Spirit, though coming 
from very different mediums (some high Calvan- 
ists and others low infidels) tallied exactly. She 
spoke very calmly about it, with no dogmatism, 
but with the strongest disposition to receive the 
facts of the subject with all their bearings, and 
at whatever loss of orthodoxy or sacrifice of repu- 
tation for common sense. I have a high appre- 
ciation of her power of forming opinions, let 
me add to this. It is one of the most vital and 
growing minds I ever knew. Besides the in- 

1 " The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning." By kind permission 
of Messrs. Harper and Brothers. 

121 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

ventive, the critical and analytical faculties are 
strong with her. How many women do you 
know who are religious, and yet analyze point 
by point what they beUeve in ? She lives in the 
midst of the traditional churches, and is full of 
reverence by nature ; and yet if you knew how 
fearlessly that woman has torn up the old cere- 
ments and taken note of what is a dead letter 
within, yet preserved her faith in essential spir- 
itual truth, you would feel more admiration for 
her than even for writing * Uncle Tom.' There 
are quantities of irreverent women and men who 
profess infidelity. But this is a woman of another 
order, observe, devout yet brave in the outlook 
for truth, and considering, not whether a thing 
be sound, but whether it be true. Her views 
are Swedenborgian on some points, beyond him 
where he departs from orthodoxy on one or two 
points, adhering to the orthodox creed on certain 
others." 

No city, perhaps, from the days of the myth 
and miracles of the saints to the present hour, 
has had its daily life so characterized by these 
wonders as Florence ; and the Hawthornes, 
TroUopes, and Mrs. Browning were especially 

122 



THE DEW OF PARNASSUS 

interested, during several months, in studying 
these psychic occurrences. 

Among other charming visitors came Mr. 
Lytton (Owen Meredith), afterwards Lord Lyt- 
ton, arriving in the midst of all this tumult. 
Already inclined to great interest in magic and 
the occult sciences, he gave much time to per- 
sonal observation and experiment. Still another 
pleasant centre of friendly intercourse was made 
in Florence by Mr. Lytton during his stay, as he 
took a villa on Bellosguardo, and on one July 
evening in 1853 he gave a reception, on his 
terrace, when Mrs. Browning made the tea, and 
strawberries and ices were served to the guests, 
who looked down upon Florence lying under the 
stars " dissolving in the purple of the hills." 
Frederic Tennyson, a brother of the poet- 
laureate, was one of the group, and also Sena- 
tore Villari, an accomplished young Sicilian. Mr. 
Kinney, the American Minister to the Court of 
Turin, and Mrs. Kinney, (better known as Eliza- 
beth Coates Kinney the poet-mother of a poet- 
son, Edmund Clarence Stedman) were then in 
Florence. Mrs. Kinney was one of the nearer 
friends of Mrs. Browning, and they, with young 
Lytton and Mr. Tennyson, often passed an even- 

123 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

ing in Casa Guidi with the Brownings. Mr. 
Lytton was at that time attached to the Lega- 
tion in Florence, and it is interesting to read 
Mrs. Browning's impressions of the future Am- 
bassador to Florence and Viceroy of India, when 
she says : " Full of all sorts of good and noble- 
ness he really is ; gifted with high faculties and 
given to the highest aspirations. . . . He is about 
to publish a collection of his poems. I think 
highly of his capabilities." 

The poet Tennyson made a brief visit in Flor- 
ence on his way to Rome during this period of 
the early fifties ; and also Thackeray and Dickens 
sojourned there. Of the visit of Mr. Dickens, 
John Forster afterward wrote : — 

" Ten years after Landor had lost this home, 
an Englishman travelling in Italy, his friend and 
mine, visited the neighborhood for his sake, drove 
out from Florence to Fiesole, and asked his coach- 
man which was the villa in which the Landor 
family lived. He was a dull dog, and pointed to 
Boccaccio's. I didn't believe him. He was so 
deuced ready that I knew he lied. I went up to 
the convent, which is on a height, and was leaning 
over a dwarf wall basking in the noble view over 

124 



THE DEW OF PARNASSUS 

a vast range of hill and valley, when a little 
peasant girl came up and began to point out the 
localities. Ecco la villa Landora! was one of the 
first half-dozen sentences she spoke. My heart 
swelled almost as Landor's would have done when 
I looked down upon it, nestling among its olive- 
trees and vines, and with its upper windows (there 
are five above the door) open to the setting sun. 
Over the centre of these there is another story, 
set upon the housetop like a tower ; and all Italy, 
except its sea, is melted down into the glowing 
landscape it commands. I plucked a leaf of ivy 
from the convent garden as I looked ; and here 
it is. For Landor. With my love. So wrote 
Mr. Dickens to me from Florence on the 2d of 
April, 1845 ; and when I turned over Landor's 
papers in the same month after an interval of ex- 
actly twenty years, the ivy-leaf was found carefully 
enclosed, with the letter in which I had sent it." 

Another interesting visitor was Count Pulsky, 
a friend of Kossuth, who shared his exile as a 
political refugee of Hungary. Together Kossuth 
and Count Pulsky also visited Boston in the 
decade of 1850-60, and were warm friends of the 
great and good Elizabeth Peabody. 

125 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Margaret Fuller, Marchese d'Ossoli, with her 
husband and child, established herself in Florence 
for some weeks, in an old palazzo at the corner of 
the Via della Misericordia and the Piazza Santa 
Maria Novella. Before her windows rose the 
Campanile, seen against the blue Itahan sky. 
Giving the mornings to her literary work, the 
evenings were devoted to her friends, among whom 
were included the Brownings and the Marchesa 
Arconati Visconti, an Italian lady of great charm 
and sweetness. A visitor to Madame d'Ossoli's 
apartment in Florence gives this picture of her 
at home : — 

" I cannot remember ever to have found 
Madame d'Ossoli alone, on those evenings when 
she remained at home. Her husband was always 
with her. The picture of their room rises clearly 
on my memory. A small square room, sparingly, 
yet sufficiently furnished, with poHshed floor and 
frescoed ceiling, — and, drawn up closely before 
the cheerful fire, an oval table, on which stood 
a monkish lamp of brass, with depending chains 
that support quaint classic cups for the ohve oil. 
There, seated beside his wife, 1 was sure to find 
the Marchese, reading from some patriotic book, 

126 



THE DEW OF PARNASSUS 

and dressed in the dark brown, red-corded coat 
of the Guardia Civica, which it was his melan- 
choly pleasure to wear at home. So long as the 
conversation could be carried on in Italian, he 
used to remain, though he rarely joined in it to 
any considerable degree ; but if a number of 
English and American visitors came in, he used 
to take his leave and go to the Cafe d'ltalia, be- 
ing very unwilling, as Madame d'Ossoli told me, 
to impose any seeming restraint, by his presence, 
upon her friends, with whom he was unable to 
converse. For the same reason, he rarely re- 
mained with her at the houses of her English 
or American friends, though he always accom- 
panied her thither, and returned to escort her 
home." 

Mrs. Browning found Madame d'Ossoli, the cel- 
ebrated American woman, extremely interesting 
in personal conversation ; " but," remarked Mrs. 
Browning, " if I wished any one to do Madame 
d'Ossoli justice, I should say, ' Never read what 
she has written.' Her written words are just 
naught. Her letters are individual and full of 
that magnetic personal influence which was so 
strong in her. ... I felt drawn to her. I loved 

127 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

her, and the circumstances of her death struck 
me to the very roots of my heart. The comfort 
is that she lost httle in this world." 

The Marchese and Marchesad'Ossoli had passed 
their last evening in Florence with Mrs. Brown- 
ing, before sailing on the fatal voyage, and of this 
last meeting Mrs. Browning wrote to Miss Mit- 
ford : " Such gloom she had in leaving Italy ! 
She was full of sad presentiment ! Do you 
know she gave a Bible as a parting gift from her 
child to ours, writing in it, * In memory of Angelo 
Eugene d'Ossoli,' — a strange, prophetic expres- 
sion. That last evening," continued Mrs. Brown- 
ing, " an old prophecy made to the Marquis 
d'Ossoli, that he should shun the sea as it would 
be fatal to him, was talked of jestingly." 

Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe did not meet 
Landor at the time she visited Florence, — he 
may have been absent on one of his visits to 
England, — but he highly estimated the quality 
of her genius, and when her story, " The Minister's 
Wooing," was pubHshed, Landor read it eagerly 
and declared that no man living had given to the 
world so excellent a novel. Mrs. Browning and 
Mrs. Stowe became warm friends, and their cor- 
respondence continued throughout Mrs. Brown- 

128 



THE DEW OF PARNASSUS 

ing's life. At their parting, when Mrs. Stowe left 
Florence, her last words to Mrs. Browning were : 
" Those who love the Lord Jesus Christ never 
see one another for the last time." The words 
almost paraphrase an ancient Oriental aphorism, 
— " Those who meet in good never separate." 
• In the meantime happy years were gliding by 
in Casa Guidi, where the wedded poets were 
giving to the world their poems ; reading the 
books, new and old, that drifted down to them ; 
seeing a few friends, and interesting themselves 
always in the world's important events. Harriet 
Hosmer, always a great favorite with Mrs. 
Browning, visited them from the Eternal City ; 
and John Kenyon, their most sympathetic friend 
and benefactor, came frequently from his English 
home. To Landor, too, came Mr. Kenyon, of 
whom Southey wrote (in 1847) that " everybody 
liked him at first sight, and hked him better the 
longer he was known ; that he had then himself 
known him three-and-twenty years ; that he 
was of all his friends one of the very best and 
pleasantest ; and that he reckoned as one of his 
whitest days the day he first fell in with him." 
" Kenyon had accomplishments of no ordinary 
kind," wrote John Forster of him, "and could 

9 129 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

give and take with the best who assembled at his 
table. He wrote manly English verse, was a 
fair scholar, a good critic of books and art, an 
observer on whom unusual opportunities of 
seeing much of the world had not been thrown 
away ; and, in a familiar friendship with him of 
a quarter of a century, I never saw him use for 
mere personal display any one advantage he thus 
possessed. He was always thinking of others, 
always planning to get his own pleasure out of 
theirs ; and Landor in this respect was an un- 
tiring satisfaction to him. He displayed his 
enjoyment so thoroughly. The laugh was en- 
couraged till the room shook again ; and, while 
Landor would defend to the death some inde- 
fensible position, assail with prodigious vigor an 
imaginary enemy, or blow himself and his adver- 
sary together into the air with the explosion of a 
joke, the radiant glee of Kenyon was a thing not 
to be forgotten. I have seen it shared at the 
same moment, in an equal degree, by Archdeacon 
Hare and Sir Robert Harry Inglis." 

During Hawthorne's summer in Florence, as 
the days grew warm he removed to the Villa 
Mont-Auto on the heights of Bellosguardo. Not 
far away was the Villa Brichieri, where Isa Blag- 

130 



THE DEW OF PARNASSUS 

den had set up her household gods, and where, for 
a time, Miss Frances Power Cobbe came in the 
spring of 1860, sharing Miss Blagden's home and 
quite impressing their callers and visitors with her 
brilliant conversation. Miss Blagden was evi- 
dently a woman of the most sympathetic and rcr 
sponsive temperament, with a power of entering 
into close and beautiful relations with a very wide 
and various range of people. The many strong 
and altogether dissimilar individualities that com- 
posed this cercle intime all found some point of 
common meeting with " Isa," as they all called 
her. She was Mrs. Browning's most intimate 
friend, and a large proportion of the " Letters " of 
Mrs. Browning, published under the able and ex- 
quisite editorship of Mr. Frederick Kenyon, were 
written to Miss Blagden. To her, letters from 
Mrs. Browning simply wrote themselves, — so un- 
failing was the spiritual sympathy between them. 
The psychology of letter- writing would involve 
subtile analysis of spiritual magnetism. The 
quality of a letter really depends much more on 
the person to whom it is written than on the 
writer. It is something, or nothing, according to 
the quality of the spirit that attracts this expres- 
sion. Letter- writing is therefore always a relative 

131 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

and never an absolute capacity. "A letter is a 
spiritual gift," Emerson has well said, and like 
any other of the higher relations, it gives itself. 
A mere mechanical chronicle can always be pro- 
duced ; but the real letter virites itself or it is not 
written. 

A learned professor in the Smithsonian Insti- 
tute has said that if any substance could be 
found that would effectually arrest magnetism, 
the secret of perpetual motion could be solved ; 
but as yet no such element could be found. 
The electric current can be stopped ; the mag- 
netic current is as inevitable as is the attraction 
of gravitation. Nothing, so far as is yet known 
to science, can arrest it. The analogy between 
spiritual and terrestrial magnetism is impressed 
upon one. Nothing can possibly arrest the mag- 
netic current of spiritual sympathy, and this 
relation between Mrs. Browning and Miss Blag- 
den seemed a predestined one of temperamental 
sympathy. 

In the Terrestrial Laboratory of the Univer- 
sity of Catania in Sicily there is a geo-dynamic 
apparatus which registers, with the greatest ac- 
curacy of precision, the conditions of stability of 
the earth. The slightest variation is instantly 

132 



THE DEW OF PARNASSUS 

recorded by the pendulums, of the utmost deh- 
cacy of structure. These seismographs are all 
placed on tables of soUd stone penetrating a 
hundred feet into the bed rock and protected by 
glass cases. They register the faintest tremor of 
the earth caused by internal forces, and these 
instruments are so sensitive that even the pres- 
ence of a person standing near expands the steel 
and disturbs the adjustment. There are eight 
of these delicately adjusted instruments all con- 
nected by an electrical circuit. One cannot stand 
in this subterranean chamber watching these 
scientific appliances, so sensitive to the slightest 
breath, without perceiving their analogy to the 
spiritual life of man. There are natures that 
instantly register in the mental life any vari- 
ation caused by the presence and the character 
of those with whom they come in contact. 
Mrs. Browning was pre-eminently one of these. 
The poet, by the very nature that predetermines 
a poet, must be 

" . . . musical. 
Tremulous, impressional," 

and Mrs. Browning Hved poetry as truly as she 
wrote it. She was one of whom it can truly be 
said that she never misapprehended, never under- 

133 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

valued any intention of kindness or courtesy. 
One instance of this is obvious in a little, undated 
note wiitten to Kate Field, who was then, as a 
young girl, placed in the cai-e of INIiss Blagden. 
It would seem from the note that INliss Field, 
with something of the presumption of earliest 
youth, had proffered some suggestion of her own 
to JMrs. Browning, who does not, however, reject 
it as somewhat of an audacity, but repUes, in an 
undated note : — 

(After Villafranca.) 

]My dear JMiss Field, — I thank you for 
your excellent advice, and also the \'ision of your 
bright, eai-nest face given in the sight of your 
handwTiting. Do observe that the " amnesty " 
fidl and entire, spoken of in " La foi des traites," 
is just given in France. This is the "second 
phrase of the Empire," and to be followed by a 
lai'ffer measure of liberal concessions. 

Which confirms and verifies the book. For 
the WTiter, Napoleon walks under, as well as on, 
the earth. Now, in Italy, he is walking under ; 
but walking, — surely, — and we may congrat- 
ulate one another in hope again. 

Then for lesser hopes — we shall meet on the 

134 



THE DEW OF PARNASSUS 

dear terrace, all alive, I hope. And also I hope 
you will accompany Miss Blagden, my dear Isa 
(I can't leave a Miss Blagden so), when she comes 
to pay us a visit. It will give us pleasure, dear 
Miss Field, if you do. 

Yours affectionately ever, 

Elizabeth B. Browning. 

Another of these little notes to Kate Field 
(which have never before been published) runs : 

(Florence, 1860.) 

July 6. 

Dear Friend, — God bless you and yours 
for all your kindness, which I shall never forget ; 
I cannot write now — except to say this — and, 
besides, that I have had great comfort from the 
beginning. I know you are truth's self in all you 
profess to feel about her — she also loved you, as 
you felt. I shall see you soon and talk to you. 
Meantime and ever remember me as 

Your affectionate E. B. 

I speak to Mrs. Field also, you understand. 

The sorrowful tone in this little note is in ref- 
erence to the death of Mrs. Browning's sister, 
Henrietta, Mrs. Surtees Cook. 

135 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Miss Blagden seems to have been always near 
Mrs. Browning, whether in Florence or in the 
adjacent resorts to which they flitted in the sum- 
mers. From Siena, Mrs. Browning wrote to an 
Enghsh friend : — 

" Dear Isa Blagden is spending the summer 
in a rough cabin, a quarter of an hour's walk 
from here, and. Mr. Landor is near by in the 
lane. This (with the Storys a mile off) makes a 
sort of colonization of the country here." 

Miss Frances Power Cobbe, who, as before 
noted, shared for a time Isa Blagden*s home in 
Villa Brichieri, was a brilliant acquisition to the 
Florentine circle. The two ladies drew around 
them an interesting company, both in theii' regular 
weekly receptions and for those unpremeditated 
social occasions that are so delightful. Robert 
Browning was one of their most familiar habitues ; 
and the Itahan poet, Dall' Ongaro, the Trollopes, 
Mrs. Stowe, and Miss Linda White (now Mme. 
Pasquale Villari) and others made up a salon of 
distinction. To Miss Blagden and Miss Cobbe 
Landor often came, and although he was then in 
his late eighties, he and Miss Cobbe rambled about 
Florence together while he poured out reminis- 

136 



THE DEW OF PARNASSUS 

cences of Southey and Shelley and other friends 
of his early life. Mme. Mario, Frederick Ten- 
nyson, and Mrs. Somerville were also among the 
nearer friends of Miss Cobbe, and Theodore 
Parker, with whom she had held a long and 
deeply interesting correspondence, came to Flor- 
'ence in the spring of 1860, only to pass on into 
the " life more abundant." After his death Miss 
Cobbe made some remark to Mrs. Stowe regard- 
ing the " end " of Theodore Parker's work, to 
which Mrs. Stowe replied, with an air of rebuke, 
" Do you think God has no work for Theodore 
Parker to do now ? " Mrs. Somerville and Miss 
Cobbe appear to have devoted their genius largely 
to discussions of the character of Christ, and as to 
what conceptions the apostles held of Him, with 
the conversational zeal that would have done 
credit to Mr. Alcott's disciples in his School of 
Philosophy in Concord. 

Harriet Hosmer, that " bewitching sprite," as 
Miss Cobbe calls her, flitted over from her Roman 
studio now and then, delighting all this famous 
circle with her irresistible charm. At that time 
Miss Hosmer had achieved her " Zenobia," her 
" Puck," her " Sleeping Faun " and her " Beatrice 
Cenci," and great things were prophesied for her. 

137 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Although Miss Hosmer has left on art a notable 
impress, she was destined to achieve a still finer 
and more permanent success by a noble and 
beautiful life which gladdened all who came 
within her influence, and was forever lofty and 
fair in its exquisite friendships and its sweet 
and liberal sympathy with all that is noblest 
in human progress. 

Isa Blagden was the daughter of a strange 
union, that of an English gentleman and a Hin- 
doo princess, and many Oriental characteristics 
were apparent in her temperament. She lived 
on in Florence until her death in 1873. Mme. 
Villari was with her at the last ; and her grave in 
the little Enghsh cemetery is quite near that of 
ISIrs. Browning. 

Though not so famous in the literary world as 
his brother, Anthony TroUope, the novelist, 
Thomas Adolphus Trollope had already during 
these years achieved recognition for his " Girl- 
hood of Catherine de' Medici," " A Decade of 
Italian Women," " Life of Filippo Strozzi," his 
novel, "La Beata," and other works, of which 
the most important is his " History "of Florence," 
— an achievement which Professor Villari, the 
great scholar and incomparable biographer of 

138 



THE DEW OF PARNASSUS 

Machiavelli and of Savonarola, pronounced the 
best among the many histories of the Tuscan 
capital. 

" The study of bygone Florentines had an in- 
terest for me which was quickened by the daily 
study of living Florentines," said Mr. Trollope of 
this work. All this group that made famous the 
social life of Florence during the middle years of 
the nineteenth century, were people with serious 
purposes in life, people engaged in serious work ; 
but they were not without their appreciation of 
the nectar and ambrosia of living, and one of their 
special devices for securing these was by picnics. 
The favorite resort for festivity was at Protolino, a 
grand-ducal park belonging to some of the later 
JMedici, some seven miles from Florence on the 
road to Bologna. The principal attraction at 
this place, Mr. Trollope relates, aside from the 
magnificent view over the thousand villas of the 
Val d' Arno, and over Florence enshrined in its 
purple hills, was the colossal figure designed by 
Michael Angelo, " the Appennino," so great that 
a platform holding four or five persons rested on 
the top of the head. 

Mr. Trollope gossips pleasantly, in his '* Remi- 
niscences," of the American Minister to Florence 

139 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

in those days, George P. Marsh, with his very 
lovely and attractive wife, — a man of liberal 
culture and a most accomplished philologist. To 
escape the intense heat of a Florentine summer 
he went to Vallombrosa, where he died, and his 
body was brought down the mountain on the 
shoulders of some of the young students of the 
School of Forestry on the height, who greatly 
loved and honored Mr. Marsh. 

A Boston friend of the Brownings, Mr. George 
S. Hillard, was often at Casa Guidi, and long 
discussions of the classic and the Elizabethan poets 
were carried on by himself and Mr. Browning. 
Mr. Hillard remarked afterward that he found the 
conversation of Mr. Browning like the poetry of 
Chaucer, which enigmatic compliment remains to 
this day unexplained. 

Mrs. Jameson, too, was a near friend and hab- 
itue of Casa Guidi, where her inability to play 
whist was less a matter of regret than at Mrs. 
TroUope's house. During these years Mrs. 
Jameson was assiduously visiting the various 
Italian cities, engaged in that monumental task 
of collating the legends and of writing the Com- 
mentaries on Italian art that make up the long list 
of her works. A gentle, refined, and melancholy 

140 



THE DEW OF PARNASSUS 

personality, never escaping the shadow of the 
great grief that came into her Hfe, she gUdes hke 
a spectral figure through the illuminated chron- 
icle, the social missal, of this brilliant group, 
during these Florentine years, when each one, 
it may be, of this "joyous company " may have — 

" Heard the faint rustle of leaves astir in the breath of the 
South, 
Felt the soft lips of the dryad laid on his eyelids and mouth : 

" So slept till the stars were all folded ; till, bright on the dim 
mountain lawn. 
The Muses came singing to wake him, pouring the wine of 
the dawn ! " 



141 



No sun could die nor yet he horn unseen 
By dwellers at my villa : morn and eve 
Were magnified hefore us in the pure 
Illimitable space and pause of sky, 
Intense as angels garments blanched with God, 
Less blue than radiant. From the outer wall 
Of the garden, drops the mystic floating grey 
Of olive-trees (with interruptions green 
From maize and vine), until 't is caught and torn 
Upon the abrupt black line of cypresses 
Which signs the way to Florence, Beautiful 
The city lies along the ample vale. 
Cathedral, tower and palace, piazza and street, 
The river trailing like a silver cord 
Through all, and curling loosely, both before 
And after, aver the whole stretch of land 
Sown whitely up and dorm its opposite slopes 
With farms and villas. 

Aurora Leigh. 



All around him Patmos lies. 
Who hath spirit-gifted eyes, 
Who his happy sight can suit 
To the great and the minute. 
Doubt not but he holds in view 
A new earth and heaven new; 



Doubt not but his ear doth catch 
Strains nor voice nor reed can match ; 
Many a silver, sphery note 
Shall within his hearing Jloat. 

Manifold his fellowships : 
Now the rocks their archives ope ; 
Voiceless creatures tell their hope 
In a language symbol-wrought ; 
Groves to him sigh out their thought; 
Musings of thejlower and grass 
Through his quiet spirit pass. 

All around him Patmos lies. 
Who hath spirit-gifted eyes ; 
He need not afar remove, 
He need not the times reprove. 
Who would hold perpetual lease 
Of an isle in seas of peace. 

Edith Thomas. 



14>4t 



IV 

IDYLLIC HOURS IN FLORENTINE SAUNTERINGS 

, " So on our soul the visions rise 

Of that fair Ufe we never lead." 

To the " spirit-gifted eyes " of painter and poet 
the vision of St. John at Patmos is ever being re- 
vealed. It assumes varied forms and offers many 
phases of significance ; and if these " spirit-gifted 
eyes " open upon Florence, where the beauty of 
the past continually mingles with the present, 
the vision can hardly fail to catch an added glory 
whose " imprisoned splendor " remains through 
life, exalting and ennobhng it. " The exceptional 
spiritual sensitiveness which characterizes men of 
genius makes them more susceptible to the per- 
manent, the eternal, than are other men," says 
Dr. Hiram Corson, and this group that stood in 
such near relations to Landor during the last 
years of his life was composed of persons all 
peculiarly responsive to the unwritten charm of 
Florence. No one expressed this appreciation 
more vividly than Mrs. Browning, who wrote.* 

10 145 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

" What Florence is, the tongue of man or poet 
may easily fail to describe ; the most beautiful 
of cities, with the golden Arno shot through the 
heart of her like an arrow, — exquisitely beauti- 
ful in its garden-ground of vineyards and oHve 
trees." This dream-life in the glorious city, with 
old tapestries and pre- Giotto pictures on the 
walls ; with strains of wandering music ever 
haunting the air, with the masterpieces of the 
world lining the galleries, might well fascinate 
the imagination of these gifted spirits, — the 
Brownings with their infinite depth and power 
of great genius and great thought, and Mr. Story 
with his versatile talent and exquisite sensitive- 
ness to impressions. The distinguishing charac- 
teristic of William Wetmore Story was a 
devotion to beauty. He was endowed with a 
temperament singularly sensitive to art influences 
in all her varied forms. Well known as author 
and sculptor, he was, besides, a painter, a mu- 
sician, a critic, and his authorship included poetry, 
romance, biography, and criticism in the attract- 
ive form of conversations. It is an interesting 
speculation as to why a man so widely gifted, so 
singularly versatile, and one, too, who added to 
his scholarship a fine culture and the famiharity 

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IDYLLIC HOURS 

with the best society of all cities, who had travelled 
extensively, and who had in all ways partaken of 
the best results of hfe, was not able to leave a 
deeper and a more permanent impress. What- 
ever is the gift which makes for greatness, Mr. 
Story did not possess. His art was aesthetic 
rather than spiritual. This was true in whatever 
form it manifested itself, whether poetry, painting, 
music, or sculpture. A courteous gentleman of 
pohshed manner, great refinement and elegance 
in ceremonial grace, delightful in conversation, 
he will live in the memory of all who knew him 
as a charming personality ; but he has left to the 
future the legacy, chiefly, of an unfaltering devo- 
tion to beauty. To her he builded his altar. 
She was the goddess of his life, his aim and in- 
spiration. That instinct of form that made him 
the sculptor is seen in all his work. His writ- 
ing is all polished and symmetrical, in its literary 
structure. There is in it nothing of any abiding 
intellectual or spiritual significance, but in his own 
way Mr. Story contributed much of signal value 
to progress ; for the culture of beauty, carried to 
the high degree of perfection to which he wrought 
it out, radiates an influence for the refinement and 
uplifting of life that cannot be calculated. 

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THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Judge Story, his father, was a celebrated jurist, 
and a graduate of Harvard. The younger Story 
showed in early youth more inclination to music 
than to any other art. He was graduated from 
Harvard in 1838, took a law course, and was ad- 
mitted to the bar. He wrote, he modelled, he 
found it difficult to concentrate his attention on 
legal problems, and, finally, in 1847, betook him- 
self to Italy, where he and the young wife he had 
married in 1843 (Miss Eldridge, of Cambridge), 
set up their household gods in the old Barberini 
palace in Rome, whence they enjoyed frequent 
interludes in Florence ; and they also passed many 
summers in Siena with the Brownings for near 
neighbors and inseparable companions. *' The 
Storys are at the top of the hill," wrote Mrs. 
Browning one summer day from Siena ; " she 
and I go backward and forward on donkey-back 
to tea-drinking and gossiping at one another's 
houses and our husbands hold the reins." All this 
pleasantly informal alfresco intimacy pervaded 
their Siena summers. Mr. Story, as has been 
said, seems to have been endowed with facility 
rather than with great original power, but a fa- 
cility so finely trained and cultured that it was 
not of that fatal order which too often ends in 

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IDYLLIC HOURS 

mediocrity. Going abroad, he had sufficient re- 
sources on which to draw, so that he never knew 
the artist's traditional struggle with poverty. He 
was free to loiter on the terraces of the Frascata 
villa, to watch the panorama of light over the 
mysterious Campagna, to enter into the enchant- 
ment and the splendor of Italy. Mr. Story 
became a resident of Rome before its old, pic- 
turesque customs had disappeared. The Villa 
Ludovisi, embowered in ilexes, was then a haunt 
of beauty ; the Colonna gardens, with their broad 
slopes and shadowy glens, and the Forum and 
the palace of the Caesars were there with all their 
atmosphere of romance and of archaeological 
interest. Thus he entered upon a life lived in 
ideal regions. 

The Story apartment in the famous old 
Barberini palace, above the Piazza del Tritone, 
included forty rooms. The Barberini is the 
most splendid private palace of Rome. It em- 
bodies the magnificence as well as the ambition 
of Urban VIII, by whom it was built in 1660. 
On the grand staircase is the lion, in high relief, 
found at Palestrina — the lion before which 
Canova used to lie studying for his design for 
the tomb of Clement XIII in St. Peter's. The 

149 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

library in the Barberini palace contains many 
rare treasures. It has a collection of seven thou- 
sand manuscripts, brought together by Cardinal 
Francesco Barberini, a nephew of Urban VIII, 
and it contains letters of Galileo, of Bembo, 
manuscripts of Dante's, illuminated missals from 
Ghirlandajo, sketches of the old Roman houses 
in the fifteenth century, made by Sangallo ; a 
Hebrew Bible, one of the twelve copies of the 
Sancino edition, and other world-renowned 
treasures. 

At the very top of this old palace of the 
Barberinis is a small room decorated with bees, 
which are the emblem of the Barberini coat of 
arms, and in this room is a portrait of Urban 
VIII, and his will is also preserved there in a 
glass case. Cardinal Barberini was the last one 
of the papal nephews to hold an independent 
principality. It is said that Urban VIII com- 
plained of his three nephews and characterized 
the Cardinal as a saint who never worked a 
miracle, Antonio as a monk who had no patience, 
and the General as a soldier without a sword. 

For more than half a century the Storys lived 
in the old Palazzo Barberini, their apartment 
being a treasure-house of art. The views from 

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IDYLLIC HOURS 

every window were beautiful enough to repay a 
journey to Rome to gaze upon these alone. 
Looking across the Eternal City to the Janiculum, 
the dome of St. Peter's was silhouetted against 
the blue Italian sky, and the grandeur of the 
colossal Castle San Angelo, seen near, added an 
impressive feature to the landscape. Near the 
Barberini palace is the Fountain of Trevi, into 
whose waters every traveller casts his penny, that 
he may, according to tradition, insure his return 
to the city of his love and dreams. 

From the first Mr. Story had the special ad- 
vantages of fine and intelligent sympathy with 
his work and aims and the encouragement of 
recognition. Hawthorne, Lowell, and Longfellow 
were among his nearest friends. Hawthorne, in 
"The Marble Faun," made the studio of Mr. 
Story one of the prominent features of that 
wonderful romance of Rome. His statue of 
Cleopatra (now in the Metropolitan Museum in 
New York) was invested with world- vdde fame 
for aU the ages by Hawthorne's exquisite inter- 
pretation of its significance. It was in Rome 
that the Storys first met the Brownings, and the 
fi'iendship formed between them continued for 
life. 

151 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

To turn back to the pages of "The Marble 
Faun" and read them, seeing Mr. Story pre- 
sented under the guise of the young sculptor, 
Kenyon, is to gain a magic view of his early life 
in Rome, in such a paragraph of Hawthorne's, 
for instance, as this: — 

"Kenyon's studio was in a cross street, or, rather, 
an ugly and dirty little lane " (Mr. Hawthorne 
writes), "between the Corso and the Via della 
Ripetta, and though chill, narrow, gloomy, and 
burdened with tall and shabby structures, the 
lane was not a whit more disagreeable than nine- 
tenths of the Roman streets. Over the door 
of one of the houses was a marble tablet, bearing 
an inscription to the purport that the sculptor's 
rooms within had formerly been occupied by the 
illustrious artist, Canova. In these precincts 
(which Canova's genius was not quite a character 
to render sacred, though it certainly made them 
interesting) the young American sculptor had 
now established himself." 

And of Mr. Story's personal appearance we 
find Hawthorne saying : — 

"The sculptor had a face which, when time 
should have done a little more for it, would offer 

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IDYLLIC HOURS 

a worthy subject for as good an artist as himself, 
features finely cut, as if already marble ; an ideal 
forehead, deeply set eyes, and a mouth much 
hidden in a light-brown beard, but apparently 
sensitive and delicate." 

Hawthorne's description of the statue of 
Cleopatra is an exquisite bit of artistic interpre- 
tation, which is, as a rule, much truer than mere 
art criticism. 

Mr. Story made himself an important factor 
in all the European social and artistic life. His 
home became the resort of the noted poets, 
artists, statesmen, and cultivated travellers. Mrs. 
Story's receptions were famous in Rome for the 
brilliant circle she drew around her. Not a man 
of powerful original genius, Mr. Story will con- 
tinue to hold a unique place among American 
artists. He had the temperament that absorbs 
and assimilates that to which it is attracted. 
His gifts did not equal Vedder's in creative force 
and in that wonderful insight which character- 
izes Mr. Vedder, and which is more than insight 
and becomes divination ; yet it was the part of 
Story to amass wealth and a wide reputation 
that could easily be mistaken for a wide fame, 

153 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

and to draw to himself a world of emoluments 
in general that the genius of Vedder has never 
compassed. Mr. Story's genius was of the as- 
similative order ; Mr. Vedder 's is of the creative. 
Mr. Story's imagination could fix itself on 
Cleopatra and cause her to live again in a won- 
derful embodiment in marble ; but Mr. Vedder 
could see the " Dance of the Pleiades " and " The 
Fates Gathering in the Stars" and interpret 
the spiritual mysteries of life. Nothing in the 
profoundest depths of life ever revealed itself to 
Mr. Story, yet his very fine order of talent was 
so constantly fed from high sources, so polished 
and cultivated on all of its many-faceted sides, 
and sustained by such exquisite quality of tast^ 
that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish it 
from genius. He was born into a certain en- 
vironment of refinement and culture that always 
remained with him through fife. His first liter- 
ary work was to write the biography of his 
father. Judge Story, an eminent jurist of the 
old Bay State, a work that included the editing 
of a large number of important letters from dis- 
tinguished people ; and one of his earliest com- 
missions in art was that of a statue of Judge 
Story, which is one of the four statues of great 

154. 



IDYLLIC HOURS 

men placed in the beautiful Chapel of Mt. 
Auburn cemetery near Boston ; and another 
of the early commissions of Mr. Story was for 
a statue of George Peabody, who, although a 
native of Vermont, became a London banker. 
He is also the sculptor of the statue of Edward 
Everett, in the Public Garden in Boston. 
Among his imaginative works, besides the " Cleo- 
patra," are a "Sibyl," "Saul," "Sappho," the 
" Infant Bacchus," a " Medea," and one work 
especially fine in its ideal conception — " Jeru- 
salem in Her Desolation," personified by a noble 
female figure in flovidng draperies. 

Mr. Story's literary work, although graceful 
and full of charm, is still the literature of re- 
sponse and assimilation, rather than of strictly 
original creation ; but his " Roba di Roma " and 
a few of his poems can hardly fail to hold an 
abiding-place in letters. The " Roba di Roma " 
seems to be written out of the overflow of ar- 
tistic impression and suggestion. Mr. Story 
adopted Landor's favorite form, the dialogue, for 
the expression of this series of running com- 
ment, and the " Roba di Roma " remains a store- 
house of no little artistic and literary treasure. 
It is a book which is little known and less read, 

155 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

save among specialists, but it well repays a care- 
ful reading, and is worthy of a permanent place 
in every library. In the little story, " Fiametta," 
is an airily touched bit of Italian romance, and in 
*' He and She, a Poet's Portfolio," is another 
dialogue work devoted to literary comment. 
Although JMr. Story's writings have recogniz- 
able claim as reflecting a refined and thought- 
ful culture, it is in his art as a sculptor and 
in the variety and choice associations of his 
social life, that his best expression may be 
found, and even claim, because of refinement 
and poetic feeling, a certain immortality, even 
though the art of sculpture, under the power- 
ful influence of Rodin, has leaped into a new 
period with new ideals and new standards 
which have fairly transformed its basis of 
estimate. 

In Mr. Story's prose there is, perhaps, little 
that will endure ; but among his poems there are 
two, " Cleopatra " and " Estrangement," which 
are by way of being remarkable. 

The former is one of the most intense, yet 
subtle, expressions of passionate love to be found, 
perhaps, in English lyrics ; the latter embodies a 
feeling that all have experienced — of the unex- 

156 



IDYLLIC HOURS 

plained and indefinable change that comes some- 
times between friends. 

" How is it ? It seems so strange ; 

Only a month ago 
And we were such friends ; now there 's a change ; 

Why, I scarcely know. 
It is not that I express 

Less, but a little more, 
A little more accent, a little more stress. 

Which was not needed before." 

In his " Roba di Roma " Mr. Story gives a 
study of Rome whose interest and value must 
be recognized. The two volumes of " Conversa- 
tions in a Studio " offer criticism on life and art 
that is stimulating, suggestive, and fine, contain- 
ing the later fruits of Mr. Story's ideas and 
impressions concerning art and literature. 

The Storys and the Brownings were much 
together in Rome. Margaret Fuller and Mrs. 
Story were on the most intimate terms, and at 
the time of Miss Fuller's secret marriage to the 
Marchese d' Ossoli it was to Mrs. Story that 
she went for counsel and sympathy. Charlotte 
Cushman, Harriet Hosmer, the Hawthornes, 
James Jackson Jarves, and many another of the 
most interesting and famous people were among 
the circle that the Storys drew about them. 

157 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Thackeray was a delighted visitor at Mr. Story's 
studio and at his home. In 1893 Mr. and Mrs. 
Story celebrated their golden wedding, and they 
then looked back over forty-five years of their 
beautiful art life in the Eternal City. They had 
three children, — Waldo, a sculptor in Rome; 
Julian, the painter, who is the husband of Emma 
Eames, and a daughter, who married the Mar- 
chese Peruzzi, of an old Florentine family closely 
allied with the Medici, and whose home is in 
Florence, with a summer residence at Vallom- 
brosa, where Mr. Story died in 1895. 

Florence offered the choicest scenic setting for 
all this drama of friendship. To Landor, an en- 
thusiastic lover of pictures ; to Browning, who 
was always deeply interested in the intellectual 
forces of Tuscany ; to Story, with his swift sym- 
pathies and versatile culture, all the Florentine 
background gave color and joy to their social 
life. The deeper intellectual forces of Italy had 
their origin in Florence. From the period of 
the Humanists, on through the radiation of 
thought from the Platonic Academy, the vast 
influence of the great libraries established in 
Florence and the power for culture that was 
wielded so generously by princely patrons of 

158 



IDYLLIC HOURS 

learning and art, — from all these mingled con- 
ditions arose the intellectual pre-eminence of 
Florence. The Florentines, like the Athenians, 
loved their city. That Landor entered deeply 
into this intense mental life that pervades Flor- 
ence as an atmosphere is evident from many 
phases of his work, and perhaps especially so in 
the. "Imaginary Conversation" represented as 
taking place between Savonarola and the Prior 
of San Marco. Landor first wrote it in Italian 
under the title " Savonarola e il Priori di San 
Marco" and it was originally published (in 1860) 
in pamphlet form. In all Lander's literary work 
nothing more impressively reveals the majesty of 
his spirit than this work, nor has biography offered 
any interpretation of Savonarola that so abso- 
lutely penetrated into his wonderful inner hfe as 
has Landor in this sympathetic divination. " My 
future is beginning in this piazza," he makes 
Savonarola say at the moment of his martyrdom ; 
" I can yet look beyond it. ... I and my words 
may pass away, but never will God's, however 
now neglected." The sublimity of that faith, 
that vision which could discern " a future, begin- 
ning from that piazza," is something unap- 
proached in any other transcription of the 

159 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

execution of Savonarola, whose dream had been 
to make all art and all learning absolutely conse- 
crated to the glory of the divine Hfe, and who 
saw, in the life beyond, the life which was to 
open to him through the flames and the torture, 
the opportunity to achieve that in which he had 
failed while on earth. 

" No work begun shall ever pause for death." 

To all the glories of art and music Savonarola 
was infinitely susceptible. On him as Professor 
Pasquale Villari has said, " Florentine art acted 
like sacred music, and bore witness to the omnipo- 
tence of genius inspired by faith. The paintings 
of Fra Angelico seemed to have brought down 
angels from heaven to dwell in the cloisters of 
San Marco, and he felt as if his soul had been 
transported to the world of the blessed." 

No one can wander to-day through the con- 
secrated convent of San Marco untouched by 
the great spirit of the man whose personal pres- 
ence pervades the very air. The cells, forever 
glorified with the ineffable beauty of Fra An- 
gelico ; the chapel, wherein are entombed Beni- 
vieni, Pohziano, and Pico della Mirandola, of the 
Platonic Academy ; the convent garden where 

160 



IDYLLIC HOURS 

Lorenzo de' Medici was accustomed to walk — 
all are eloquent of Savonarola. 

Of one occasion this anecdote is preserved. 
" A monk in the interest of Lorenzo went to 
Savonarola with the message that Lorenzo il 
Magnifico was walking in the garden. * Did he 
ask for me ? ' asked Savonarola. * No, Father,' 
rephed the priest. * Let him then pursue his 
devotions undisturbed,' tranquilly rephed Savon- 
arola." It is, however, in the library of San 
Marco that one comes pecuharly near the personal 
presence of Savonarola. Here is the httle niche 
in the wall with a slightly raised dais where he 
stood when preaching to his brethren, and the 
room wherein was enacted the last remarkable 
scene of his life in the convent, thus described 
by Professor Villari : — 

" In the middle of this hall, under the simple 
vaults of Michelozzi, Savonarola placed the 
sacrament, collecting his brethren around him, 
and addressed them in his last and memorable 
words : * My sons, in the presence of God, stand- 
ing before the sacred Host, and with my enemies 
already in the convent, I now confirm my doc- 
trine. What I have said came to me from God, 
n i6i 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

and He is my witness in heaven that what I say- 
is true. I little thought that the whole city 
would so soon have turned against me ; but 
God's will be done. My last admonition to you 
is this : Let your arms be faith, patience, and 
prayer. I leave you with anguish and pain, to 
pass into the hands of my enemies. I know not 
whether they will take my life ; but of this I am 
certain, that, dead, I shall be able to do far more 
for you in heaven than, living, I have ever had 
power to do for you on earth.' " 

Of all places in Florence it is perhaps in San 
Marco that the visitor lingers longest and to 
which he turns most often. The library still 
echoes with the words of Savonarola to the Frati 
on that night of Palm Sunday, 1498, when he 
received in writing the promise of the signoria 
that he, with his companions, should be safely 
returned. With his friars he sought the hbrary, 
where he preached eloquently in Latin, exhort- 
ing them all to follow God with patience, faith, 
and prayer. He was ready, he told them, to re- 
ceive all tribulation with joy for the love of the 
Lord, knowing that in doing good and suifering 
evil consisted the Christian life. He concluded 

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IDYLLIC HOURS 

his sermon, and on leaving the library said to his 
brethren : 

" I will say to you what Jeremiah said : ' This 
thing I expected, but not so soon nor so 
suddenly.' " 

Another chronicler of the scene says : — 

" He exhorted them further to live well and 
to be fervent in prayer. And having confessed 
to the Father Fra Domenico da Pescia, he took 
the communion in the first library. And the 
same did Fra Domenico. After eating a Uttle, 
he was somewhat refreshed ; and he spoke the 
last words to his friars, exhorting them to per- 
severe in religion, and kissing them all he took 
his last departure from them. In the parting, 
one of his children said to him : * Father, why 
dost thou abandon us and leave us so desolate ? ' 
To which he repHed : * Son, have patience ; God 
will help you ; ' and he added that he would either 
see them again alive or that after death he would 
appear to them without fail. Also, as he departed, 
he gave up the common keys to the brethren, 
with so great humihty and charity, that the friars 
could not keep themselves from tears, and many 
of them wished by all means to go with him 
At last recommending himself to their prayers, 

163 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

he made his way towards the door of the Hbrary, 
where the first commissioners, all armed, were 
awaiting him ; to whom, giving himself into their 
hands like a most meek lamb, he said : * I recom- 
mend to you this my flock and all these other citi- 
zens.' And when he was in the corridor of the 
library he said : * My friars, doubt not, for God will 
not fail to perfect His work ; and although I be put 
to death, I shall help you more than I have done 
in life, and I will return without fail to console you, 
either dead or alive.' Arrived at the holy water, 
which is at the exit of the choir. Era Domenico 
said to him : * Fain would I too come to these 
nuptials.' Certain of the laymen, his friends, 
were arrested at the command of the Signoria. 
When the Father Era Girolamo was in the first 
cloister, Era Benedetto, the miniaturist, strove 
ardently to go with him ; and when the officers 
thrust him back he still insisted that he would 
go. But the Father Era Girolamo turned to him 
and said : * Era Benedetto, on your obedience 
come not, for I and Era Domenico have to die 
for the love of Christ.' And thus he was torn 
away from the eyes of his children." 

In San Marco there are several works by Era 
Bartolommeo, one being of the Madonna which 

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IDYLLIC HOURS 

is very beautiful. This painter had been deeply 
impressed by the sermons of Savonarola and had 
felt that he was called to the religious life as a 
vocation. For some time he lived in monastic 
retreat at Prato, and finally, being removed to 
San Marco, he again turned to his art, resolving 
to use it only for devotional subjects. A portrait 
of Savonarola which he painted is a wonderful 
interpretation of the very spirit of the great 
martyr. 

In the two cells that were occupied by Sa- 
vonarola one feels very close to that life that was 
lived there four hundred years ago. His desk, 
his chair, his rosary, and a copy of his sermons ; 
a most interesting old picture which belonged 
to the Buondelmonti family showing the tragic 
scene of the execution of Savonarola on May 
28, 1498, all absorb the visitor. It was his per- 
sonal devotion to St. Thomas Aquinas that led 
Savonarola to choose the Dominican order of 
monks, and it was only eight years before his 
death that he had been chosen Prior of San 
Marco. The church in the monastery could not 
begin to hold the crowds that thronged to listen 
to him, and he obtained leave to preach in the 

Duomo. " In order to participate in the benefits 

165 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

of the spiritual food he dispensed," says a writer, 
" the inhabitants of the town and neighboring 
villages deserted their abodes, and the rude 
mountaineers descended from the Apennines 
and directed their steps towards Florence, where 
crowds of pilgrims flocked every morning at 
break of day, when the gates were opened, and 
became the objects of a charity truly fraternal, 
the citizens vying with one another in the exer- 
cise of the duties of Christian hospitality, em- 
bracing them in the streets as brothers, even 
before they were acquainted with their names, 
while some of the more pious received them by 
forty at a time into their houses." 

There were rich and beautiful mornings passed 
by one and another of this group of choice spirits 
in the Uffizi or the Pitti galleries. The Palazzo 
Pitti always suggests to the thoughtful visitor 
the curious workings of destiny. When Luca 
Pitti gave to Brunelleschi the order to design 
him a palace so vast that "the doors of the 
Palazzo Medici should serve as models for the 
windows " he httle dreamed that his hated rivals 
would come into possession of the magnificent 
architectural creation which was built to crush 
their pride and outdo their splendor. Luca 

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IDYLLIC HOURS 

Pitti had served Florence as Prior, Gonfalonier, 
and as Ambassador to Rome ; he was the rival 
of the Medici and the Strozzi, whose ambitions 
he planned to undermine ; but his projects ended, 
instead, m his own defeat and ruin. The 
treachery he planned against the Medici re- 
turned against himself, and although warned by 
Niccolo Soderini, he was unable to avert the 
consequences of his plot against the Medicean 
dynasty. It was in 1440 that Brunelleschi re- 
ceived this commission, which he only lived to 
carry out to the second story, leaving the com- 
pletion of the palace to other hands. In 1549 it 
was purchased by the Duchessa Eleonora di 
Toledo, the wife of Cosimo I, and in the spring 
of the following year they took possession of it, 
and thus the palace passed into the possession of 
the Medici. Some idea of the immensity of the 
Pitti Palace can be gained from its proportions, 
each window being twenty-four feet wide and 
each of the three stories forty feet in height. It 
is an impressive rather than beautiful palace, 
looking more Hke a vast fortress. George Eliot 
said that this palace was a wonderful union of 
Cyclopean grandeur and massive regularity. 
The Court of the palace has statues and a foun- 
167 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

tain, and from this one passes into the Silver 
Chamber (camera degli Argenti) in which the 
royal plate is kept which includes a service of 
lapis-lazuli, and work by Benvenuto Cellini and 
PoUajuolo. 

The private apartments of the king comprise 
a study, in which are two beautiful cabinets in 
mosaic and bronze which belonged to the Medici, 
a sleeping-room, with canopied bed, and a toilet 
chamber with innumerable mirrors. The Queen's 
private apartments have a boudoir, whose walls 
are covered with pale rose satin, embroidered, 
and the chairs and sofa upholstered in the same. 
Here, too, is one of those exquisite cabinets in 
which Cosimo and his Eleonora seem to have so 
lavishly indulged. In the sleeping-room the bed 
is canopied in dark green brocade, and at the 
head is a prie dieu with a font holding holy 
water, over which hangs a crucifix. There is a 
writing-table of rare beauty, and in the sala di 
toilette^ opening from this room, are wonderful 
triplicate mirrors, magnificent wardrobes, and a 
dressing-table furnished with articles in gold and 
pearl. The royal apartments contain a few pic- 
tures of note, — a " Madonna of the Roses " by 
Botticelli, and also a Madonna by Carlo Dolci. 

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IDYLLIC HOURS 

The great canvas of " Pallas and the Centaur" 
by Botticelli (often referred to as " An Allegory ") 
is placed in these apartments, and it is considered 
one of the most interesting of his works. The 
figure of Pallas is instinct with vitality ; and the 
ethereal draperies, fluttering as she glides forward 
clutching the hair of the Centaur, suggest the very 
poetry of motion. The intense blue of the sky 
and the glimpse of shore in the background con- 
tribute to the exquisite pictorial effect. 

The pictures in the Pitti gallery number some 
five hundred only, but in quality they form the 
richest and most important gallery in the world. 
These works are almost exclusively great master- 
pieces. The gallery comprises sixteen rooms, 
known as the Sala dell' lliade, the Sala di Giove, 
and the Salas of Apollo, Venus, Mars, Ulysses, 
Prometheus, and others, not to forget the Sala 
della Stufa (Salon of the Stove), for a stove in 
Italy is fairly entitled to rank as an important 
and interesting curio, if not as a treasure of art ! 
Here one wanders on and finds the wonderful 
" Vision of Ezekiel," in which the prophet, gazing 
into the heavens, sees the Heavenly Father in all 
the glory of splendor, leaning from the clouds 
with angels and seraphs ; Fra Bartolommeo's 

169 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

" Ecce Homo ; " the Madonna of Filippo Lippo ; 
Raphael's " La Donna Velata ; " the " Warrior " 
of Salvator Rosa, and two of his enchanting 
landscapes ; Perugino's " Adoration," with its 
infinite sweetness ; and the " Assumption " of 
Andrea del Sarto. 

Guido Reni's " Cleopatra " is a vivid, brilliant 
work, showing the Egyptian queen in the splen- 
dor of her beauty — the bust uncovered and the 
asp at her breast. The expression of the face is 
a study. One of the greatest works here is Gi- 
orgione's " Concert," in which the very genius of 
music is painted. The monk has his hands on 
the clavichord ; his head is turned away, and one 
feels that he is hearing harmonies not of this 
world. The very genius of music shines from 
the beautiful, impassioned face. Here, too, one 
finds the famous " Mamage of St. Catherine," by 
Titian, Andrea del Sarto's " Dispute About the 
Trinity," Raphael's " Madonna della Seggiola," 
in which the Mother sits in a low chair holding 
the Child, while St. John folds his tiny hands in 
prayer ; the coloring is exceptionally pure and 
strong ; Salvator Rosa's " Conspiracy of Cati- 
line," Raphael's "Holy Family," Murillo's 
Madonna, Raphael's portrait of Julius II, Per- 

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IDYLLIC HOURS 

ugino's " Magdalen," Albert Durer's " Adam 
and Eve," — two life-sized portraits. Eve repre- 
sented as with golden hair, — and Da Vinci's por- 
trait of Ginevra. These are but a few of the 
rich works that leave their very impress upon 
life. The well-known picture of " The Three 
Fates," usually attributed to Michael Angelo, is 
a very striking work. Connoisseurs differ in their 
opinions as to the artist, some good authorities 
inclining to believe it the work of Fiorentino. 
The " Assumption of the Virgin," by Andrea del 
Sarto, is one of the noblest works in the entire 
world of art. In the luminous atmosphere the 
Virgin is seen, seated on the clouds, gazing up- 
ward with a celestial expression. Of Andrea 
del Sarto's works Swinburne has written : " At 
Florence only can one trace and tell how great 
a painter, and how various, Andrea was. There, 
only, but surely there, can the spirit and presence 
of the things of time on his immortal spirit be 
understood." The " Annunciation " by this artist, 
which is in the Pitti, is one of the most poetic 
conceptions given by any artist of that sublime 
event. Mary is represented as having just risen 
from prayer when the angel appears bowing on 
one knee, and the instantaneous and sublime im- 

171 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

pression made upon the Virgin is felt in every 
line and gesture. The " Holy Family " and the 
figure of St. John as a boy, by Andrea del Sarto, 
are in these galleries, with other works of this 
artist. No more beautiful example of coloring 
combined with wonderful expressiveness of the 
figures can be found in any work of Titian's than 
in his " Marriage of St. Catherine," and the light 
on the picture recalls to the gazer Longfellow's 
lines regarding this artist : — 

" You have caught 
These golden hues from your Venetian sunsets. 

The uttermost that can be reached by color 
Is here accomplished." 

Titian's " La Bella " represents a young and 
beautiful woman with a delicate, proud patrician 
face ; the luxuriant hair coiled in braids ; the 
three-fourths-length figure is portrayed standing, 
costumed in rich brocade, decollete, with long 
puifed sleeves. It is without doubt a portrait of 
the Duchessa Eleonora, the wife of Cosimo I, as 
the face is the same as that of her authorized 
portrait by Titian which is in the Uffizi. The 
belief that the Duchessa is the original of this 
picture has been questioned, but it is now 

172 



IDYLLIC HOURS 

generally accepted on the evidence of the 

portrait. 

Raphael can be studied to great advantage in 

the Pitti, although the devotee of his art will find 
an earthly paradise in the Raphael stanza in the 

. Vatican. In the Pitti is not only the " Madonna 
della Seggiola" already mentioned, but the " Ma- 
donna della Granduca," showing the halo around 
the heads of the Mother and the Holy Child, — a 
picture of the utmost reverence and stately sim- 
plicity ; and beside these is the " Madonna del 
Baldacchino," revealing the Virgin and the Child 
seated under a canopy with angels near. These 
Madonnas, with their celestial loveliness and 
human tenderness and charm, recall to one anew 
the words of John Addington Symonds when he 
says : " What distinguishes the whole work of 
Raphael is its humanity in the double sense of 
the humane and the human. . . . Even sadness, 
tragedy, and death take loveliness with him." 

One of the most fascinating of Raphael's works 
is "La Donna Velata," a portrait which has 
nothing in common with his Madonnas, but is 
full of fine detail and subtle feeling. The " San 
Marco " of Fra Bartolommeo is a work of great 
force ; the portrait of " Rubens " by himself, and 

173 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

his landscape, "Ulysses on the Islands of the 
Phoenicians," are most interesting. Salvator 
Rosa's " Harbor at Sunset " is a picture with such 
a glory of coloring that no words can convey any 
adequate idea of its beauty. One work by Carlo 
Dolci, " St. Andrew Praying before his Execu- 
tion," must have a word of itself. The sweetness 
and beauty of the expression in the face makes this 
work almost greater than his famous Madonna. 
One fascinating composition (attributed to Boni- 
fazio Veronese) is " The Sybil Explaining to 
Augustus the Mystery of the Incarnation." 

All these halls of the Pitti gallery are beauti- 
ful in themselves, in the rich decorations of the 
ceiling, the inlaid floors, and the sumptuous tables 
of mosaic and bronze and colored marbles, and 
the magnificent vases with which they are deco- 
rated. 

The views from the windows of the Palazzo 
Pitti are superb. On one side are seen the heights 
of Bellosguardo, crowned with white stone villas, 
and the mediaeval tower ; another looks towards 
Fiesole, and the view to the east over the city is 
one of the most striking in all Europe, taking 
in the Duomo, the strange mediaeval tower of 
Civita Vecchio, the dome of San Spirito, and the 

174 



IDYLLIC HOURS 

bell tower of San Lorenzo, which contains the 
bell given by Anna Maria de' Medici, the sister 
of the last Grand Duke of this historic family, 
and which was erected as late as 1740. 

The Uffizi gallery is notable for its long corri- 
dors of sculpture, for many fine works, and for 
the special representations of different schools, 
the French, Flemish, Venetian, Italian, and 
Dutch, and for the gallery of the portraits of liv- 
ing artists painted by themselves, which, begin- 
ning with Michael Angelo, Da Vinci, Raphael, 
and others of their time, extends to contemporary 
artists, as Sir John Millais, Alma Tadema, Puvis 
de Chavannes, Bonnat, Henner, and George Fred- 
erick Watts. 

The Church of San Lorenzo had a peculiar at- 
traction for the group of friends who loved to 
wander about Florence. " The general effect is 
very sombre," Hawthorne records, " and the 
shrines, the monuments, and the statues look 
dingy with time and neglect." The interior is, 
indeed, dark and forbidding, but the very gloom 
has its fascination. 

One's first impression is a sense of vacant space, 
and in imagination one hears, even across the gulf 
of five hundred years, the impassioned eloquence 

175 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

of Savonarola, who, from this very pulpit that 
we now see, fearlessly launched his denuncia- 
tions at the Medici family, the immediate patrons 
of the church itself. Just before May 9, 1498, 
when he was put to death in the Piazza Signoria, 
he preached one of his most thrilling sermons in 
San Lorenzo, whose accents almost seem to echo 
there to-day. The vast space is in the form of a 
Latin cross. Corinthian columns divide the nave 
from the aisles. There is a beautiful singing gal- 
lery, inlaid with white and colored marbles and 
crystal. There are sculptures and paintings rep- 
resenting Donatello, Dupre, Rossellini, Verroc- 
chio, Perugino, and here in the Medici chapel is 
the great masterpiece of Filippo Lippi, an An- 
nunciation. Very recently — indeed, in 1896 — 
a monument to Donatello, the work of Raffaello 
Romanelli, was placed in this chapel. In con- 
nection with this church of San Lorenzo is 
the Lorentian library, which was initiated by 
Cosimo il Vecchio, the son of Giovanni di Bicci, 
the rich and powerful noble to whom Florence 
owes so much. It is a curious fact, that, 
although the populace grumbled regarding the 
tyranny of the Medici family, they yet became 
so accustomed to the yoke as to miss it when it 

176 



IDYLLIC HOURS 

fell off, and to demand its return. In the fifteenth 
century Cosimo and his brother Lorenzo (II 
Magnifico) were exiled to Padua, but the people 
became discontented and tumultuous, and the 
Medici were recalled, to return with triumphs 
and rejoicings, and, indeed, the period of their 
greatest power came after this. There were two 
Cosimos in the Medici family — the elder called 
" II Vecchio," to distinguish him from the Grand 
Duke of the same name. Cosimo il Vecchio 
died in 1469, and his son Piero succeeded. As 
before noted, it was he who married Mona 
Lucrezia Tornabuoni. 

He became the head of the republic when but 
fifteen years of age and his reign was a remark- 
able one. His was a great nature, enthusiastic, 
liberal, and generous. He was the patron of 
arts and science, and the restorer and promoter 
of Florentine magnificence. Under his leader- 
ship Florence acquired that prestige which she 
has never entirely lost as the artistic and intel- 
lectual metropolis of Italy. It may not be gen- 
erally remembered that Pope Clement VII was 
a Medici. Lorenzo il Magnifico had a brother, 
Giuliano, who was murdered by Bernardo Ban- 
dini, of the conspiracy of the Pazzi. He had 
12 177 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

never married, but he left a son. The Magnifi- 
cent recognized this nameless nephew, educated 
him, and he became a cardinal under Leo X, 
and afterward the Pope known as Clement VII. 
The reign of Lorenzo was no less glorious in 
defeat than in triumph. Pope Sixtus IV and 
Ferdinand, King of Naples, hated the Medici, 
and brought war against Florence. Disaster 
followed disaster, and Lorenzo voluntarily went 
to Naples to put himself in the hands of Ferdi- 
nand. But the King of Naples, too, was not 
without his magnanimity, and the personal meet- 
ing of the two men was the initiation of a warm 
friendship between them, and there ensued a 
peace that gave many glorious years to Florence. 
Lorenzo the Magnificent died in Carreggi in 
1492, the same year in which America was dis- 
covered. He had married Clarice Orsini, and of 
this marriage there were seven children, of 
whom one of the daughters, Maria, was the 
love of Michael Angelo. The eldest son, Pietro, 
succeeded to the government of Florence, but 
he lacked his father's noble qualities. He was 
arrogant and selfish, and wished to reign inde- 
pendent of the Signoria, who are the Parliament 
of Florence. Pietro placed Pisa and Leghorn 

178 



IDYLLIC HOURS 

in the hands of Charles VIII, of France, and 
this so incensed the Florentines, who were urged 
on also by the fiery eloquence of Savonarola, 
that they banished the Medici from Florence 
again, robbed their houses, and captured all 
the rich treasures that had been collected by 
Lorenzo il Magnifico. He died in exile in 
1504, and left a son, named Lorenzo, and a 
daughter, Clarice, who married Filippo Strozzi : 
whose name is now given to the new viale skirt- 
ing a park in the more modern part of the city. 

Florence in her own way is as distinctive as 
Rome. The contrast is great. The archaeological 
interest is in Rome, but in the purely artistic 
Florence is far the richer, and especially in 
sculpture. Any hour in the day one may stroll 
into church or gallery and see masterpieces 
that hold their own through all the ages. No 
city has a more vividly defined centre and point 
of departure for sight-seeing than has Florence 
in the Duomo. The marvellous monument of 
the genius of Brunelleschi dominates the entire 
city. From it everything else is relative. Like 
Rome and Paris, Florence is divided by her 
river, — the turbid, muddy Arno ; and while the 
principal centre of business is on one side, the 

179 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

two are almost equal in point of historic and 
social importance. The square around the 
Duomo, called the Piazza del Duomo, is the 
centre of various streets, one of which leads di- 
rectly to the Piazza della Signoria, on which the 
Palazzo Vecchio and the Loggia de' Lanza, filled 
with great groups of sculpture, are located. 

From this piazza are the entrances to the grand 
council chamber of the Vecchio, where stands 
the colossal statue of Savonarola, and from which 
open the rooms of the Medici family, filled with 
their treasures. Here, too, is the entrance to 
the Uffizi gallery, and a little street near runs 
down to Santa Croce, in which are the tombs of 
Michael Angelo, Alfieri, a monument to Dante, 
and other wonderful groups. Just beyond the 
Palazzo Vecchio lies the famous Ponte Vecchio, 
over the Arno, — the bridge lined with the shops 
of jewellers and vendors of bric-a-brac. Along 
the bank of the river is the well-known drive and 
promenade called the Lung' Arno, with shops 
and hotels facing the river, and the spires and 
towers of the city on the opposite side ; and the 
background of hills crowned with villas offers 
one of the most picturesque views in the world. 
The dome of San Spirito is defined against a 

180 




SAVONAROLA. 

From the Statue hij Pazzi in the Palazzo Vecchio. 



IDYLLIC HOURS 

golden background in the late afternoon, and 
following this promenade one comes to the 
Cascine, which is to Florence what the Pincian 
hill is to Rome. Florence is so rich in art that 
one knows not where to begin in speaking of its 
treasures. One of the most interesting churches 
is that of Sante Croce, and it is one of the first 
to which the tourist turns his steps. It dates 
from the year 1297, and was commenced by the 
monks of St. Francis, who were under the special 
protection of Pope Gregory IX. Giotto became 
master of the work in 1334, but the facade is 
modern, and was completed as late as 1863. 
Over the grand entrance is a bas-relief repre- 
senting the Elevation of the Cross, by Giovarmi 
Dupre, of Siena, who is also the sculptor of a 
fine statue of the Madonna Addolorata. There 
is an hour in this church in the late afternoon, 
when the sunset lights touch paintings and sculp- 
tures with the gleams of gold, that is one to 
be remembered. 

Sante Croce is the Florentine Pantheon. It 
was here that the most impressive and magnetic 
preacher of his day, Fra Francesco da Monte- 
pulciana, held his audiences under a spell half 
of terror, half of love, and where in response to 

181 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

his vivid painting of the horrors that followed 
those who did not repent, they all cried out: 
" Misericordia." A larger number of the ancient 
Florentine families are entombed here than in 
any other one church. The inscriptions form 
almost a history of Florence, for there is hardly 
an important family whose name is not found 
here. The church is lined with monuments to 
the greatest Italians. Here is Donatello's statue 
of St. Louis, Bishop of Toulouse. San Bernar- 
dino of Siena has a tablet here. Vasari's monu- 
ment to Michael Angelo is a grand conception. 
As will be remembered, Michael Angelo died in 
Rome (in 1565) at the age of ninety, and Cosimo 
I had the body secretly brought to Florence. 
The funeral ceremonies took place in the church 
of San Lorenzo, and the oration was pronounced 
by Benedetto Varchi, the historian and poet. It is 
said that every artist in Florence contributed to 
the decoration of the church on this occasion, and 
a high mass in solemn music was rendered before 
the body was entombed in Santa Croce. Al- 
though the ashes of Dante rest in Ravenna, the 
monument to him by Ricci, placed in the piazza 
of Santa Croce, is one of the important modern 
works in Florence. 

182 



IDYLLIC HOURS 

A bronze tablet in Santa Croce commemo- 
rates Garibaldi, and another is placed to the 
memory of the great patriot Mazzini. The 
Duchess of Albany placed in this church the 
monumental tomb of Alfieri, and an imposing 
monument is that erected to the memory of 
Machiavelli. 

In no city has history and art been more 
closely interwoven than in Florence. In fact, 
Florentine art is simply consecrated by the sacri- 
fice, the nobility, the loftiness of purpose out of 
which it springs, and the glory of its heroic age 
still lingers. We have all been more or less ac- 
customed to hearing of the crimes and iniquities 
of the Medici ; but the record of this family of 
Florentine nobles comprises some of the most 
generous and uplifting passages in history. 

One of the most charming drives around 
Florence is to the Certosa — the old convent 
that crowns the summit of a hill whose slopes 
are all in a glimmer of silver-green olive trees, 
interspersed with the tall, dark cypresses. The 
Certosa dates back to 1341, when Niccolo Accia- 
juolo induced the repubhc to grant its fortifica- 
tions. There are now only a few monks in 
residence, and their occupation is less that of 

183 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

devotion than of the manufacture of chartreuse 
which they sell to the visitors. The cloister is 
very attractive with its Luca della Robbias, and 
the church is rich in frescoes and marbles. The 
high altar is over a crypt, in which are the tombs 
of the founder of his family. Perkins, in his 
" Tuscan Sculptors," says : — 

" Whether Andrea Orcagna built the Certosa 
near Florence is uncertain ; but the monuments 
of its founder, Niccolo Acciajuolo, and his family, 
which exist in the subterranean church, belong 
to his time, and were perhaps executed by some 
of his scholars. The tomb of Niccolo (Grand 
Seneschal of the kingdom of Naples under Queen 
Joanna I, ob. 1366) consists of his recumbent 
statue, clad in armor placed high against the wall, 
beneath a rich gothic canopy. His son, Lorenzo, 
upon whose funeral obsequies he spent more than 
fifty thousand gold florins, lies below under a 
marble slab, upon which is sculptured the effigy 
of this youth of a most lovely countenance, 
cavalier and great baron, tried in arms, and emi- 
nent for his graceful manners and his gracious 
and noble aspect. Next him lie his grandfather 
and his sister Lapa. The general design of 

184 



IDYLLIC HOURS 

Niccolo's tomb is very peculiar, gothic cer- 
tainly, but almost transitional to the cinquecento. 
Niccolo, the Grand Seneschal, founder of the 
convent, was a noble character. The family, 
originally from Brescia, and named after the 
trade they rose by, attained sovereignty in the 
person of Ranier, nephew of the Seneschal, styled 
Duke of Athens and Lord of Thebes and Argos 
and Sparta. He was succeeded by his bastard 
son Antony, and the latter by two nephews, 
whom he invited from J'lorence, Rani on and 
Antony Acciajuolo ; the son of the latter, Fran- 
cesco, finally yielded Athens to Mahomet II in 
1456, and was soon afterwards strangled by his 
orders at Thebes." 

The tomb of Bishop Angelo Acciajuolo, by 
Donatello, is also very striking. Of the recum- 
bent figure of the Bishop of Cortona, also in this 
crypt, Mr. Perkins says : — 

" It is very carefully modelled: the flesh parts 
are well treated, and the drapery is disposed 
in natural folds. It has almost the effect of a 
corpse laid out for burial before the altar, and 
produces a striking effect." 

185 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Passing on to the foot of Bellosguardo, one 
comes to the ancient Church of San Francesco 
di Paola, where the bishop of Fiesole lies, of 
whose tomb Mr. Perkins says : — 

" The admirably truthful figure of the dead 
bishop, clad in his episcopal robes, is laid upon a 
sarcophagus within a square recess, whose archi- 
trave and side posts are decorated with enamelled 
tiles, painted with flowers and fruits colored after 
nature. At the back of the recess, filling up 
the space above the sarcophagus, are three half- 
figures, of Christ, the Madonna, and St. John ; 
all the faces are expressive, and that of the Sa- 
viour is especially fine and full of mournful dig- 
nity. Around the top of the sarcophagus runs 
a rich cornice, below which are sculptured two 
flying angels, bearing between them a garland 
containing an inscription setting forth the name 
and titles of the deceased." 

The panoramic beauty of all this region is the 
more exquisite because of the rich color scheme. 
The amethyst mountains change to rose, to pur- 
ple, to gray, to green, the delicate shades blend- 
ing into each other and deepening, fading, paling, 

186 



IDYLLIC HOURS 

receding as one watches them. It was from this 
Bellosguardo region that Hawthorne wrote : — 

" The Umbrian Valley opens before us, set in 
its grand framework of nearer and more distant 
Jiills. It seems as if all Italy lay under our eyes 
in this one picture. For there is the broad, 
sunny smile of God, which we fancy to be spread 
over this favored land more abundantly than on 
other regions, and beneath it glows a most rich 
and varied fertility. The trim vineyards are 
there, and the fig trees, and the mulberries, and 
the smoky-hued tracts of the olive orchards ; 
there, too, are fields of every kind of grain, 
among which waves the Indian com. White 
villas, gray convents, church spires, villages, 
towns, each with its battlemented walls and 
towered gateway, are scattered upon this spa- 
cious map ; a river gleams across it ; and the 
lakes open their blue eyes in its face, reflecting 
heaven, lest mortals should forget that better 
land when they behold the earth so beautiful." 

All these drives and the old cloisters and niches 
were endeared to the Storys by almost daily famil- 
iarity, and Mr. Browning frequently accompanied 

187 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

them, although Mrs. Browning's health made 
excursions seldom possible for her. Landor, too, 
was one of the most ardent habitues of churches 
and galleries. His mania — for it was hardly 
less — for collecting old paintings was one of his 
marked characteristics, as was his lack of dis- 
crimination between the genuine and poor imita- 
tions. During one of his last drives around 
Florence, narrates Kate Field, " he stopped the 
horses at the corner of a dirty little old street, 
and, getting out of the carriage, hurriedly dis- 
appeared round a corner, leaving us without 
explanation and consequently in amazement. 
We had not long to wait, however, as he soon 
appeared carrying a large roll of canvas. ' There ! ' 
he exclaimed, as he again seated himself, ' I 've 
made a capital bargain. I 've long wanted these 
paintings, but the man asked more than I could 
give. To-day he relented. They are very clever, 
and I shall have them framed.' Alas ! they were 
not clever, and Landor, in his last days, had 
queer notions concerning art. That he was ex- 
cessively fond of pictures is undoubtedly true ; 
he surrounded himself with them, but there was 
far more quantity than quality about them. He 
frequently attributed very bad paintings to very 

188 



IDYLLIC HOURS 

good masters ; and it by no means followed be- 
cause he called a battle-piece a * Salvator Rosa,' 
that it was painted by Salvator. But the old 
man was tenacious of his art opinions, and it 
was unwise to argue the point." Mr. Browning 
always endeavored to exert a restraining influ- 
ence over Landor's too indiscriminate purchases, 
which often proved to be a small fortune to 
unscrupulous dealers. 

Mrs. Browning's first acquaintance with Lan- 
dor began in England, some years before her 
marriage, and of this first meeting with Landor 
and Wordsworth (in 1836), she wrote : " At the 
same time I saw Landor — the brilliant Landor ! 
and felt the difference between great genius and 
eminent talent." That she had stood face to 
face with these two poets ; that she had met 
" Landor, in whose words the ashes of antiquity 
burn again," was an event to her, and neither 
would have dreamed how this meeting initiated 
a lifelong friendship destined to hold peculiar 
experiences. Landor was full of life and im- 
passioned energy. He had been one of the 
great group to first recognize Robert Browning's 
genius on the appearance of " Paracelsus," — a 
group which included Leigh Hunt, Barry Corn- 

189 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

wall, Dickens, and Wordsworth. It was not, 
however, until after the marriage of Elizabeth 
Barrett and Robert Browning, and their estab- 
lishment in Casa Guidi in Florence, that Landor 
came to know them intimately, and the apprecia- 
tion gradually grew, on the part of the Brown- 
ings, to tender solicitude and the final care of 
Landor in his latest years. When " Luria " had 
appeared (in 1866), Browning dedicated it to 
Landor in these words : " I dedicate this last 
attempt for the present at dramatic poetry, to a 
great dramatic poet, ' wishing what I write may 
be read by his light,' if a phrase originally ad- 
dressed, by not the least worthy of his contem- 
poraries, to Shakespeare, may be applied here by 
one whose sole privilege is in a grateful admira- 
tion to Walter Savage Landor." Of Browning 
Landor had said : — 

" He has sent me some admirable things. I 
only wish he would atticize a httle. Few of 
the Athenians had such a quarry on their prop- 
erty, but they constructed better roads for the 
conveyance of the material." 

Still later Landor had written, in a letter to 

Sou they : — 

190 



IDYLLIC HOURS 

" I have written to Browning ; a great poet a 
very great poet, indeed, as the world will have 
to agree with us in thinking. 1 am now deep 
in the SouTs Tragedy. The sudden close of 
Luria is very grand ; but preceding it I fear 
there is rather too much of argumentation and 
reflection. It is continued too long after the 
Moor has taken the poison. I may be wrong . 
but if it is so, you will see it and tell him. God 
grant he may Uve to be much greater than he is, 
high as he stands above most of the living : latis 
humeris et toto vertice. But now to the Soul's 
Tragedy, and so adieu till we meet at this very 
table." 

The foundation of the friendship which was to 
prove to be to Landor the blessing of his last 
years was thus laid in intellectual appreciation 
and mutual esteem. " It requires a god to rec- 
ognize a god," runs an old proverb. In this case 
the recognition was mutual and generous. Lan- 
dor 's admiration for Mrs. Browning was infinitely 
deepened and extended when "" Aurora Leigh " 
appeared. " I am reading a poem," he wrote of 
it, " full of thought and fascinating with fancy, 
— Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh. In many 

191 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

pages there is the wild imagination of Shakes- 
peare. I had no idea that any one in this age 
was capable of so much poetry. I am half drunk 
with it. Never did I think I should have a good 
hearty draught of poetry again : the distemper 
had got into the vineyard that produced it. 
Here are indeed, even here, some flies upon the 
surface, as there always will be upon what is 
sweet and strong. I know not yet what the 
story is. Few possess the power of construction." 

Although the Storys made occasional visits to 
Florence, and had passed several summers in 
Siena, they did not come to know Landor well 
until the very close of his life. IMr. and Mrs. 
Story had once paid him a brief visit in England, 
introduced to him by Mr. Kenyon, and of this 
IMrs. Story records that he was extremely cordial 
and kind and induced them to pass some time 
with him. " He had his walls lined with paint- 
ings, of no great value, I believe," she adds, 
" but bearing high-sounding names of the Italian 
schools." 

The friendship between the Brownings and the 
Storys was, on the part of the latter, at least, the 
most interesting of their lives. Mr. Henry James 
narrates with what eager response INIr. Story 

192 



IDYLLIC HOURS 

visited every day the Pitti gallery, at the time 
of his first sojourn in Florence, when he and 
Browning met, and how Mr. Story abounded 
" in descriptions of pictures, statues, museums, 
churches, and in enthusiasms, opinions, and dis- 
appointments." All this artistic tumult fasci- 
nated Browning's imagination. During one of 
the early sojourns of the Storys in Florence came 
Mr. and Mrs. Christopher Pearse Cranch of Cam- 
bridge, Massachusetts, and they all " sat over the 
fire and told stories." Mr. Cranch was one of 
those versatile and delicately gifted New Eng- 
landers — a poet, painter, musician, who, like 
Jones Very and Dr. Parsons, must be closely 
and, indeed, reverently approached to be in any 
adequate sense appreciated. He was a man of 
exquisite divination, as revealed for instance in a 
stanza of his : — 

" We are spirits clad in veils : 
Man by man was never seen ; 
All our deep communion fails 
To remove the shadoAvy screen." 

Together Browning and Story made excursions 
to the old Badia, which contains that beautiful 
tomb by Mino da Fiesole ; the quaint and mas- 
sive Bargello, formerly the Palace of the Podesta, 

13 193 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

whose picturesque court, with its grand staircase 
by Goddi impressed them, it may well be be- 
lieved, in the same profound manner that is felt 
by the artistically inclined tourist of to-day. The 
fine upper loggia, the design of Orcagna, is his 
best monument, and the tragic cell for the con- 
demned — rarely vacant in his day — still gives a 
shiver to the sensitive observer. The Arms of 
the Duke of Athens and those of more than two 
hundred Podestas, are a rich and eiFective feature 
of the court. The upper salons which were for- 
merly the apartments of the Podesta contain 
many notable objects : Donatello's " David," 
standing with his foot on the head of Goliath ; 
the wonderful " Dancing Mercury " of Giovanni 
da Bologna, with its airy, floating lightness ; a 
gruesome reliquary ; and countless old bronzes, 
frescoes, and curios. 

To what extent Santa Croce impressed the 
poet and the sculptor, there is no record. Mrs. 
Browning seems always to have been fascinated 
by Santa Maria Novella, with its famous Cim- 
abue, and the strange old green cloister. Santa 
Croce is the Westminster Abbey of Florence ; and 
the tombs of Michael Angelo, of Machiavelli, 
of Alfieri, the frescoes of Giotto in the Capella 

194 




MERCURY. 

From the Bronze of Giovanni da Bologna. 



IDYLLIC HOURS 

Peruzzi — the finest series that he ever produced 
— allure one to linger away many a morning 
until the old sacristan relentlessly closes its doors. 
The Storys spend " long, quiet evenings with the 
Brownings at Casa Guidi," and Mrs. Story and 
Mrs. Browning read and discuss " Jane Eyre " 
together. " Plainly 'Jane Eyre ' is by a woman," 
said Mrs. Browning. At the festival of Corpus 
Domini the Storys and the Brownings together 
watch the motley procession that fills the streets 
between the Palazzo Vecchio and the piazza of 
Santa Maria Novella, where the compagnie of 
the churches, costumed in white, with curls on 
their heads and with black draperies, march with 
their banners ; the nobility, richly clad with 
scarlet capes, follow, and the Host is borne, 
under a sumptuous canopy, into the church, the 
soldiers all kneeling in the piazza as it passes. 
All the nameless fascination of foreign customs 
charmed the eye and furnished that scenic back- 
ground which made so picturesque the friendship 
between the Storys and the Brownings. Mr. 
Story writes from Rome to James Russell 
Lowell, after one of their returns from Florence, 
that Browning has " great vivacity . . . and very 
great frankness and friendliness of manner and 

195 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

• 
mind." There was an idyllic summer at Bagni 

di Lucca, when, high up in the chestnut-wooded 
hills, the Brownings and the Storys passed idle 
days together ; taking evening drives along the 
rushing little Serchio where Shelley used to row 
his boat, and " falling asleep whenever the wind 
blew coolly through the windows." Both Mr. 
and Mrs. Browning were deeply absorbed in 
work that summer, — she engaged on " Aurora 
Leigh," and he busy in collecting and revising 
his lyric poems for publication. This Arcadian 
life was full of brightness. There is a picnic to 
Porto Fiorito, — the revelries being conducted 
by the Bro^iiings, the Storys, and Mr. Lytton, 
who, Secretary of the Legation in Florence, es- 
capes for a day in the woods. They "passed 
over wild and grand scenery " and found an old 
church " from which the view was magnificent, — • 
with deep patches of purple shade and little grey 
towns perched here and there." And on another 
day they dined together "on a smooth grassy 
table under the trees and rocks." And Mr. 
Story records : ^ " The whole day in the woods 
with the Brownings. We went at ten o'clock, 

1 " William Wetmore Story ; And His Friends." By kind permis- 
sion of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 

196 



IDYLLIC HOURS 

carrying our provisions. Browning and I walked 
to the spot, and there, spreading shawls under the 
great chestnuts, we read and talked the Uvelong 
day, the Lima, at our feet, babbling on over the 
stones." ... So the gods talked, apparently 

" in the breath of the woods ; " 

and we have Emerson's word for it that 

" the poet who overhears 
Some random word they say 
Is the fated man of men 
Whom the ages must obey." 

When the Storys were not in Florence there 
were always possibilities that the Brownings 
might be in Home, — their journey thither, on 
one trip, extending over eight days, during which 
they visited Assisi, and its great monastery and 
triple church. They arrived in Rome to find 
that the Storys had taken an apartment for them, 
and to find " lighted lamps and fires, and smihng 
faces that evening." Later there came the Siena 
summers when the Storys and the Brownings 
made their villeggiatura in the strange mediaeval 
hill-town, one summer of which Landor was with 
them as the guest of the Storys. These lovely 
chapters of life ran on from year to year until, 

197 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

in the last June days of 1861, Elizabeth Browning 
entered on that Hfe more abundant; and more 
than a quarter of a century later, in the Decem- 
ber of 1889, came to Robert Browning the beau- 
tiful realization of his immortal lines : — 

" O thou soul of my soul ! I shall clasp thee again, 
And with God be the rest ! " 



198 



Ah what avails the sceptred race, 

Ah what the form divine ! 
What every virtue, every grace ! 

Rose Aylmer, all were thine. 
Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes 

May weep, hut never see, 
A night of memories and of sighs 

I consecrate to thee. 

Walter Savage Landor. 

Come lovely and soothing death. 

Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving. 

In the day, in the night, to all, to each, 

Sooner or later delicate death. 

The night, in silence under many a star. 

And the soul turning to thee vast and well-veil' d death. 
I bring thee a song that when thou mtist indeed come, come 
unfalteringly. 

Walt Whitman. 

The lingering charm of a dream that hasjled, 
The rose's breath when the rose is dead. 
The echo that lives when the song is done. 
The sunset glories that follow the sun, — 
Everything tender and everything fair . 
That was, and is not, and yet is there — ... 

Louise Chandler Moulton. 



V 

THE DREAM OF ROSE AYLMER 

" The lilies die with the dying hours ! 
Hushed is the song-birds' lay. 
But I dream of summers and dream of flowers 
That last alway." 

A VISION, just revealed and then withdrawn ; a 
dream that fled in the moment of waking ; a 
voice whose echo alone thrilled the air : — 

"... one blue deep hour 
Of lilies musical with busy bliss, — " 

and then withdrawn into the unseen world to 
make Paradise more fair, — something of this 
was the dream of Rose Aylmer in the life of 
Walter Savage Landor, — a girl of seventeen 
with whom he wandered among garden roses 
and in shady lanes one summer in his earliest 
youth ; a girl who lent him a romance from 
whose pages he derived his idea of the poem of 
"Gebir;" and then their paths divided, — hers 
turning to India, where at the age of twenty she 
died, and his into the busy and absorbing ex- 
periences of life and Uterature, from whence, only 

201 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

at the age of nearly ninety years, was he released 
to go on into that far, fair country we shall all 
one day see. Yet, that this momentary vision of 
Rose Aylmer, in all her youth and grace and 
loveliness, left on Landor the most intense and 
permanent impress of all the experiences of his 
ninety years of life, can be doubted only by those 
who fail to understand that intense and eternal 
reality of an impress made on the imagination. It 
is the lightning-flash that leaves its mark ; the ex- 
perience of one instant that stamps a hfetime. 

" His instant thought a poet spoke 
And filled the age his fame. 
An inch of ground the lightning struck 
But lit the sky with flame." 

The poetry of a lifetime may be condensed 
into one brief summer's hour, but that hour will 
hold an influence far outweighmg that of all the 
years. These are the moments that stamp their 
impress indelibly on life ; that control and de- 
termine its entire course and destiny. No one 
can ever go back of such experiences and be the 
same as before. 

'' Not wholly can the heart unlearn 
The lesson of its better hours. 
Nor yet has Time's dull footstep worn 
To common dust that path of flowers." 
202 



THE DREAM OF ROSE AYLMER 

Like a strain of ethereal music running as a 
motif through a great symphony, so the dream 
of Rose Ayhner ran through all Landor's long 
and varied experiences, only occasionally recur- 
ring to outward recognition, but holding its subtle 
coloring and control of his inner life. There are 
glimpses of things too beautiful for earthly reali- 
zation that sometimes flash upon the vision ; 
through space and silence soul calls to soul, and 
all the fairy bells ring out in ethereal melody ; 
recognitions coine as pledge and prophecy alone, 
and are withdrawn to flower into perfect realiza- 
tion in the hfe beyond. Yet within the cloud 
the glory lives undimmed, nor can any ou^er 
experience in Hfe compare, in intensity and in 
ineffaceable impression, with these. Never can 
these experiences be banished from memory and 
imagination. 

" We cross an unseen line 
And lo ! another zone." 

It is that which eludes the grasp, that which 
can never be defined, that thrills the soul with its 
immortal loveliness. 

" The rose we gathered not 
Lives in our hearts forever." 
203 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

It is the voice that " from inmost dreamland 
calls " which echoes down the pathway of a life- 
time. In the beautiful words of Florence Earle 
Coates, — 

" Something I may not win attracts me ever, — 
Something elusive, yet supremely fair. 
Thrills me with gladness, but contents me never. 
Fills me with sadness, yet forbids despair. 

" It blossoms just beyond the paths I follow. 
It shines beyond the farthest stars I see. 
It echoes faint from ocean caverns hollow. 
And from the land of dreams it beckons me. 

" It calls, and all my best, with joyful feeling. 
Essays to reach it as I make reply : 
I feel its sweetness o'er my spirit stealing 
Yet know ere I attain it, I must die I " 

The finer fruitions of life are like the seed that 
is not quickened unless it dies. 

" The choicest fruitage comes not with the spring ; 
But still for summer's mellowing touch must wait. 
For storms and tears which seasoned excellence bring." 

The life in this world 

'* . . . is not conclusion ; 
A sequel lies beyond." 

The more significant and the more real expe- 
riences await their fruition in the life which is to 

204 



THE DREAM OF ROSE AYLMER 

come. " Love comes not by obeyed commands, 
but by fulfilled conditions." Between Walter 
Savage Landor and Rose Aylmer the conditions 
were not then fulfilled. It was a poetic rather 
than an emotional dream that Rose Aylmer in- 
-spired in the poet ; yet there can hardly be a 
question as to the unconscious influence that her 
memory exercised over his life, — an influence of 
exquisite delicacy and exaltation. The charm of 
the Httle lyric which bears Rose Aylmer's name 
as its title is something that eludes all analysis 
and enchains every heart. " The deep and tender 
pathos of that little poem could hardly be sur- 
passed," says John Forster, and in delicacy and 
sweetness it is perfect. It was first printed in its 
present form some years after it was written, — 
and has since affected many readers with the 
same indefinable charm ascribed to it by Charles 
Lamb in an unpubhshed letter to Landor in 
1832, when he wrote : " Many things I had to 
say to you which there was not time for. One 
why should I forget? 'Tis for Rose Aylmer, 
which has a charm I cannot explain. I lived 
upon it for weeks." 

Myth and legend and reality have so united 
themselves regarding the personality of Rose 

205 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Aylmer that many of the readers and lovers of 
Landor have hiu'dly ascribed to her an existence 
more real than that of Poe's " Lenore." Yet 
Rose had a local habitation and a name and a 
most interesting history, however brief in its ex- 
periences on earth. The Honorable Rose Whit- 
worth Aylmer was born in England in October, 
1779, and died on March 2, 1800, in India. The 
Aylmer family date back to John Aylmer, 
bishop of London in the sixteenth century. 
From him was descended Baron Aylmer, the 
fourth of that title, who died in 1785. Lady 
Aylmer and her daughters were living in retire- 
ment in Swansea, Wales, when Landor, sus- 
pended from Oxford for some infringement of 
college rules, fixed on Swansea as his place of 
retreat to read Milton and Pindar, he being just 
twenty-one at the time ; and thus the fates 
arranged their meeting. A younger sister of 
Rose became Mrs. Paynter and her two daugh- 
ters, Rose and Sophy, were well known in 
London Society. Rose Paynter became Lady 
Graves-Sawle, and a miniature of her, painted by 
O. J. Taylor, portrays her as one of the most 
beautiful of women. To her Landor wrote a 
great number of letters ranging over the years 

206 



THE DREAM OF ROSE AYLMER 

from about 1838 to 1863, shortly before his death. 
It was soon after establishing himself in Villa 
Eandor on the Fiesolan hills that he met Mrs. 
Paynter — somewhere early in the decade of 
1830-40. He had not seen her before since, as 
a little child, he remembered her when meeting 
daily with the beautiful Rose, the dream of his 
early youth. Mrs. Paynter gave him a lock of 
Rose's hair, a tress of burnished gold, which to 
the latest day of his life he kept in his cedar 
writing-desk. Not long before his death Landor 
opened this desk one day to show its treasures to 
Kate Field, who has thus recorded the incident : 

" * lanthe's portrait is not the only treasure this 
old desk contains,' Landor said, as he replaced it 
and took up a small package, very carefully tied, 
which he undid with great precaution, as though 
the treasure had wings and might escape, if not 
well guarded. ' There ! ' he said, holding up a 
pen- wiper made of red and gold stuff in the shape 
of a bell with an ivory handle, — * that pen- wiper 

was given to me by , Rose's sister, forty years 

ago. Would you believe it ? Have I not kept it 
well ? ' The pen- wiper looked as though it had 
been made the day before, so fresh was it. *Now,' 

207 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

continued Landor, *I intend to give that to 
you.' 

" * But, Mr. Landor — ' 

" ' Tut I tut ! there are to be no buts about it. 
My passage for another world is ^beady engaged, 
and I know you '11 take good care of my keepsake. 
There, now, put it in your pocket, and only use 
it on grand occasions.' 

"Into my pocket the pen- wiper went, and, 
wrapped in the same old paper, it lies in another 
desk, as free from ink as it was four years ago. 

" Who Rose was, no reader of Landor need be 
told, — she to whom * Andrea of Hungary ' was 
dedicated, and of whom Lady Blessington, in one 
of her letters to Landor, wrote : * The tuneful 
bird, inspired of old by the Persian rose, warbled 
not more harmoniously its praise than you do that 
of the English Rose, whom posterity will know 
through your beautiful verses.' Many and many 
a time the gray-bearded poet related incidents of 
which this English Rose was the heroine, and for 
the moment seemed to live over again an interest- 
ing episode of his mature years." 

It was undoubtedly the lady whom Landor 
called " lanthe " to whom he wrote the stanzas : 

208 



THE DREAM OF ROSE AYLMER 

** No, my own love of other years ! 

No, it must never be. 
Much rests with you that yet endears, 

Alas ! but what with me ? 
Could those bright years o'er me revolve 

So gay, o'er you so fair. 
The pearl of life we would dissolve 

And each the cup might share. 
You show that truth can ne'er decay, 

Whatever fate befalls ; 
I, that the myrtle and the bay 

Shoot fresh on ruin'd walls." 

Stephen Wheeler, the accompUshed editor of a 
number of " Letters," and heretofore unpubhshed 
writings of Landor, says in one of his interesting 
volumes ; — 

" I have been unable to find any portrait of 
Rose Aylmer. In Mr. Andrew Lang's collec- 
tion of lyrics there is a picture of a ghost-like 
lady which is supposed to represent her, but it is, 
I fear, merely a fancy sketch. A portrait of 
Lady Graves-Sawle, Rose Aylmer's niece, was 
published in the * Book of Beauty for 1840.' " 

Rose Aylmer went out to India in May of 1798, 
with her uncle and aunt. Sir Henry and Lady 
RusselL Sir Henry was then the Judge of the 
Supreme Court of Judicature in Bombay and 

u 209 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

he was one of the distinguished men of the time 
and was appointed to this responsible position by 
the Crown. Lady Russell took with her two 
nieces, Rose Aylmer and iuiother young girl who 
became the wife of Sir Theophilus Metcalfe. Of 
Miss Aylmer 's two years' life in India no record 
seems obtainable ; but her death is chronicled in 
an Indiim journal entitled the " Asiatic Register," 
the notice reading that " the Hon. Miss Aylmer, 
a young lady of gieat beauty and accomplishments, 
died in Ciilcutta on JNlarch 3, 1800, of Asiatic 
cholera." Her tomb is in the design of a high 
shaft set on a pedestal composed of several tiers 
of steps. It is in the cemetery in South Park 
Street in Calcutta, and engraved on it is the fol- 
lowing inscription : — 

" In memory of the Honorable Rose Whit- 
worth Aylmer, who depai'ted this hfe Mai'ch 3, 
1800, aged twenty yeai's." 

It is Siiid to be to her death that Landor alludes 
in the lines : — 

" My pictures blacken in their frames 
As night comes on. 
And youthful maids and wrinkled dames 
Are now all one. 
210 



THE DREAM OF ROSE AYLMER 

" Death of the day ! A sterner Death 
Did worse before ; 
The fairest form, the sweetest breath 
Away he bore." 

When Mrs. Paynter gave the lock of her 
lister's hair to Landor, he wrote ; — 

" Beautiful spoils ! borne off from vanquisht death ! 
Upon my heart's high altar shall ye lie. 
Moved but by only one adorer's breath, 
Retaining youth, rewarding constancy." 

To Lady Graves- Sawle before her marriage he 
wrote a little birthday verse that ran ; — 

" Ten days, ten only, intervene 
Within your natal day 
And mine, O Rose ! — but wide between 
What years there spread away ! " 

The voluminous letters written by Landor to 
Lady Graves- Sawle, both for years before her 
marriage, and after it, up to the closing year of 
his life, reveal Landor in all his tenderness and 
playful joy of spirit. In Rose Paynter he felt 
some one akin to his dream-love, Rose Aylmer. 
Although Miss Paynter had never seen her aunt, 
yet for Rose Aylmer's sake as well as her own, 
she was endeared to Landor. Under date of 

211 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

December, 1838, he writes to Rose Paynter in 
Paris : " You ought to be very happy, for you 
have taken all our happiness with you, and you 
know how much there was of it. When on one 
side of you is sorrow at leaving the most aiFec- 
tionate of mothers ; on the other all the pleasures 
and all the hopes awaiting and inviting you, con- 
sider what a precious thing it is to be so beloved 
by everybody. It will never make you proud : 
may it always make you happy." 

Again he playfully writes to her : — 

" Did mamma ever let you into the secret that 
she sometimes writes Italian poetry ? She wrote 
these lines on the Friday : — 

PENSIERI DI MAMMA 

* Si, reposa la mia Rosa ! 
La mattina pallidina 
Segnera per infelici ; 
Chi sa, chi s^, quanti amici ! 
Sosterranno dire addio 
Tutti quelli, — ma non io.' 

"I never prided myself on my talents for 
translation, but I have attempted to give the 

212 



THE DREAM OF ROSE AYLMER 

following as much the air of the original as 
possible : — 

* Calmly fall the night's repose 
On your eyelids^ blessed Rose ! 
When pale morning shines again. 
It will shine on bitter pain. 
Friends who see you go away 
(Oh, how many friends !) will say, 
*' Blessed Rose ! adieu ! adieu ! " 
I may bear to say it, too. 
But alas ! when far from you.* 

"... I have brought your rose-tree into the 
house this morning. It lost its last leaf the 
day you went. . . . Wear for my sake on your 
birthday the small white flower which you tell 
me has been admired in Paris. . . . You have 
much to do, much to see, much to enjoy ; I will 
not allow you to sacrifice too many half-hours in 
writing to me; for I know that I shall always 
possess a quiet little nook in your memory." 

In a letter to Miss Paynter under date of 
March, 1839, accompanying a copy for her of 
his little volume, "Andrea of Hungary and 
Giovanna of Naples," Landor says : " Believe 
me, it is a horrible thing to have many literary 
friends. They are apt to fancy that, however 

213 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

5^0111* time may be occupied, you must at all 
events have time enough to read what they send 

you." 

Of Dickens Landor wi'ote, in a letter to ^liss 
Paynter: "You fill me with delight by your 
generous and just remarks on Dickens. No 
mortal man ever exerted so beneficial and exten- 
sive an influence over the human heart." 

A little lyric wi'itten to this later Rose of his 
friendship thus runs : — 

" Nay, thank me not again for those 
Camellias, that untimely rose ; 
But if, whence you might plejise the more. 
And win the few unwon before, 
I sought the flowers you loved to wear 
O'erjoyed to see them in your hair. 
Upon my grave, I pray you, set 
One primrose or one violet. 
Nay, I can wait a little yet." 

To Mrs. Paynter, Landor remarked in a letter 
that her daughter Rose had kept alive in him the 
spirit of poetry. 

Miss Paynter was married in February of 1866 
to Sir Charles Graves-Sawle, and for her wedding 
day Landor sent her a poem in which occur the 
lines : — 

214 



THE DREAM OF KOSE AYLMER 

**. . . Arise, 
Far-«ighte<l bride ! Lrx>k forward ! Qearer views 
And highf.r hopes li'; >ind*;r calmer skies. 
I'ortune in vain f;allerjl oiit V> thiee ; in vain 
Rays from high regions darted ; Wit jx/urwl out 
His sparkhng treasures ; Wis<lorn laid his crown 
Of richer je,wels at thy reckless feet. 
Well hast thou chosen. I repeat the wwds. 
Adding as true ones, not unt^ild before. 
That incense must have fire for its ascent, 
Ivise 'tis inert and cannot reach the idol." 

For the birthday of Lady Graves-Sawle in 1857 
he sent her the lyric : — 

"The sharlows deepen round me ; take, 
J wi)l not say my last arlieu, 
But, this faint verse ; and for my sake 
Keep the last line I trace for you. 

"The years that lightly t«^)uch your he^ 
Nor steal away nor change one hair 
Press upon mine with heavy treafl 
And leave but barren laurels there." 

In 1800 he is urging Lady Graves-Sawie and 
her husband to visit him in Florence. "The 
Gulf of Spezia is quite as well worth seeing as 
the Bay of Naples," he says, " and Florence is 
richer in works of art than any other city in the 
world." 

215 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Again, in January of 1862, he writes to her of 
the many friends who are dead. " Mrs. Brown- 
ing among these ; and Browning has gone to Eng- 
land, probably never to revisit Florence. There 
still remain Kirkup and Mrs. Trollope." And the 
last letter that Landor ever wrote to this cherished 
young friend was on her birthday, January 19, of 
1864. " You see, dear Rose," he writes, " that I 
have not forgotten the nineteenth of January. 
May you have many such birthdays, all as happy 
as any in the past. In ten days more I shall 
enter my eighty-ninth year. . . . This is probably 
the last tidings you will receive from your affec- 
tionate old friend." 

So it proved to be, although Landor lived on 
until the following September. But in all the 
chapters of human history there is perhaps no 
more tender and poetic idyl than this Dream of 
Rose Aylmer transferred from the beautiful ideal 
of his earliest youth to her niece and namesake. 
Rose Paynter, and thus continuing over a space 
of sixty-eight years, even into the closing years 
of his life. 

In February of 1896 Sir Charles and Lady 

Graves-Sawle celebrated their golden wedding at 

their home in Penrice, Cornwall. They were the 

Sl6 



THE DREAM OF ROSE AYLMER 

recipients of many gifts, among which were a pair 
of gold Queen Anne cups, presented by the Earl 
of Mount-Edgcombe in behalf of the county 
magistrates, with an illuminated address and a 
gold clock from their tenantry. Sir Charles 
Graves- Sawle was then eighty years of age. This 
event of less than a decade since seems to strangely 
bridge the time from the lovely Rose Aylmer of 
Landor's most exquisite Ijnric to the present day. 
Nor can this chapter in the life of Walter Savage 
Landor have any other closing save the lyric — 
almost the last that ever came from his pen — 
that follows : 

" The grave is open ; soon to close 
On him who sang the charms of Rose, 
Her pensive brow, her placid eye. 
Her smile, angelic purity. 
Her voice so sweet, her speech so sage. 
It checked wild Youth and cheered dull Age, 
Her truth when others were untrue. 
And vows forgotten. 

Friends, adieu ! 
The grave is open. . . . O how far 
From under that bright morning star." , ' 

The rest is silence. 



217 



There have been instances of culture developed by every high 
motive in turn, and yet intense at every point ; and the aim of our 
culture should be to attain not only as intense but as complete a life 
as possible. But often the higher life is only possible at all on con- 
dition of a selection of that in rvhich one's motive is native and 
strong ; and this selection involves the renunciation of a crown re- 
served for others. Which is better ; to lay open a new sense, to 
initiate a new organ for the human spirit, or to cultivate many types 
of perfection up to a point which leaves us still beyond the range 
of their transforming power ? 

Walter Pater. 

' Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us 
artists. Every touch should thrill. Every man should be so much 
an artist that he could report in conversation what had befallen 
him. 

Emerson. 




ENTRANCE TO GROUNDS OF VILLA LANDOR. 



VI 

« IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS." 

It came into him, life ; it went out from him, trwth ; it came to 
him, short-lived actions ; it went out ftova him, immortal thoughts. 

Emerson. 

In the entire range of English literature there is 
nothing, except Shakespeare, so remarkable in 
dramatic realization of a vast range of widely 
opposite and widely varying characters as are the 
" Imaginary Conversations " of Landor. It was 
his especial design not to allow one of these to 
contain " a single sentence written by, or recorded 
of the persons who are supposed to hold them," 
and this aim was absolutely realized. His ideal 
was to so entirely grasp and absorb into him- 
self the personality of each character chosen as 
to be able to speak with the voice and think with 
the mind of the individuals therein presented. 
To divine, not what they said, but what they 
would have said, on a great variety of occasions 
and over a great range of topics, was the task 
Landor set himself to achieve. The power of 

221 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

dramatic sympathy to enter thus into the very 
penetralia of life, — of the Hfe of this numerous 
and varied assembly, is something almost beyond 
human conception. Landor's " Imaginary Con- 
versations" are a colossal landmark in English 
literature. Lowell says that, with the single ex- 
ception of Shakespeare, no poet has furnished so 
many delicate aphorisms of human nature, as has 
Landor. Their complete issue fills six large vol- 
umes which dramatize the thought, the personal 
attitude at a given moment, of dozens of the 
most marked individualities in the world, over a 
range of discussion that embraces art, philosophy, 
poetry, ethics, economics and history. Not only 
this, but the conversations hold every reader who 
approaches them under a spell of genius that can- 
not be analyzed or explained. The power that 
could successfully portray such a range of diverse 
characters as those that are presented in these 
" Dialogues," making each one take his conversa- 
tional part in entire keeping with his own indi- 
viduality and in true relation to the chronology, 
the environment, the circumstances of the time, 
is hardly less marvellous than that which created 
the dramas of Shakespeare. The characters in 
these " Conversations " are representative of al- 

222 



« IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS " 

most every country and every age, — an immense 
and stately procession of the dominant individu- 
alities of the most diverse character and aims. 
Rousseau and Malesherbes discuss the question 
as to whether truth is the object of philosophy, 
]\Jalesherbes asserting that, even if the object of 
philosophy, it is not of philosophers. " My opin- 
ion is," Landor makes him say, " that truth is not 
reasonably the main and ultimate object of phi- 
losophy ; but that philosophy should seek truth 
merely as the means of acquiring and of propa- 
gating happiness. Truths are simple; wisdom, 
which is formed by their apposition and appli- 
cation, is concrete : out of this, in its vast 
varieties, open to our wants and wishes, comes 
happiness. But the knowledge of all the truths 
ever yet discovered does not lead immediately 
to it, nor indeed will ever reach it, unless you 
make the more important of them bear upon 
your heart and intellect, and form, as it were, 
the blood that moves and nurtures them." 

Rousseau is still unconvinced. " I never en- 
tertained a doubt until now," he rejoins, " that 
truth is the ultimate aim and object of philos- 
ophy: no \\Titer has denied it, I think." 

Malesherbes concedes that none may: "but 

223 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

when it is agreed," he continues, " that happiness 
is the chief good, it must also be agreed that the 
chief wisdom will pursue it ; and I have already 
said, what your own experience cannot but have 
pointed out to you, that no truth, or series of 
truths, hypothetically, can communicate or at- 
tain it. Come, M. Rousseau, tell me candidly, 
do you derive no pleasure from a sense of supe- 
riority in genius and independence ? " 

** The highest," admits Rousseau, " from a con- 
sciousness of independence." 

Gaining this admission Malesherbes proceeds : 
" Ingenuous is the epithet we affix to modesty, 
but modesty often makes men act otherwise than 
ingenuously : you, for example, now. You are 
angry at the servility of people, and disgusted at 
their obtuseness and indifference, on matters of 
most import to their welfare. If they were equal 
to you, this anger would cease ; but the fire 
would break out somewhere else, on ground 
which appears at present sound and level. Vol- 
taire, for instance, is less eloquent than you : but 
Voltaire is wittier than any man living. This 
quality — " " Is the quality of a bufToon and a 
courtier," Rousseau interrupts him by saying ; 
" but the buffoon should have most of it," char- 

224 



" IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS " 

acteristically adds Rousseau, " to support his 
higher dignity." 

Malesherbes observes that Voltaire's dignity 
is Attic, and Rousseau rejoins : " If mahgnity 
is Attic. Petulance is not wit, although a few 
grains of wit may be found in petulance : quartz 
is not gold, although a few grains of gold may be 
found in quartz." 

Between Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII what 
an entirely different world of thought and feehng 
is entered by Landor and portrayed in their con- 
versation. 

" I do not regret that I have been a queen and 
am no longer one," we find Anne saying ; " nor 
that my innocence is called in question by those 
who never knew me ; but I lament that the good 
people who loved me so cordially, hate and curse 
me ; that those who pointed me out to their 
daughters for imitation check them when they 
speak about me ; and that he whom next to 
God I have served with most devotion is my 
accuser." 

One of the most charming of these " Conver- 
sations " is that between " Boccaccio and Pe- 
trarca," in which the author of the " Decameron " 
accosts the poet and assures him that there is no 

15 225 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

doubt but that, if he could remain in Italy, he 
would soon receive the same distinctions as in 
his native country. " For greatly are the Flo- 
rentines ashamed," Boccaccio continues, "that 
the most elegant of their writers and the most 
independent of their citizens lives in exile, by 
the injustice he had suffered in the detriment 
done to his property, through the intemperate 
adminstration of their laws." 

" Let them recall me soon and honorably," 
vehemently replies Petrarca; "then perhaps I 
may assist them to remove their ignominy, which 
I carry about with me wherever I go, and which 
is pointed out by my exotic laurel." 

Boccaccio rejoins that " there is, and ever will 
be, in all countries and under all governments, 
an ostracism for their greatest men." 

Petrarca impatiently ignores this. " At pres- 
ent we will talk no more about it," he says ; " to- 
morrow I pursue my journey towards Padua, 
where I am expected; where some few value 
and esteem me, honest and learned and ingenious 
men ; although neither those Transpadane re- 
gions, nor whatever extends beyond them, have 
yet produced an equal to Boccaccio." 

Boccaccio begs him, in the name of friendship, 

226 



" IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS " 

.not to go ; *' form such friends rather from your 
fellow-citizens," he urges. "I love my equals 
heartily ; and shall love them the better when I 
see them raised up here, from our own mother 
earth, by you." 

- Boccaccio alludes to his house, and Petrarca 
rejoins : — 

" The house has nothing of either the rustic 
or the magnificent about it ; nothing quite reg- 
ular, nothing much varied. If there is any- 
thing at all affecting, as I fear there is, in the 
story you are about to tell me, I could wish the 
edifice itself bore externally some little of the in- 
teresting that I might hereafter turn my mind 
toward it, looking out of the catastrophe, though 
not away from it. But I do not even find the 
peculiar and uncostly decoration of our Tuscan 
villas, — the central turret, round which the kite 
perpetually circles in search of pigeons or smaller 
prey, borne onward, like the Flemish skater, by 
effortless will in motionless progression. The 
view of Fiesole must be lovely from that 
window ; but I fancy to myself it loses the 
cascade under the single high arch of the 
Mugnone." 

227 



THE FLORENCE OP^ LANDOR 

To which Boccaccio replies : — 

" I think so. In this villa — come rather fur- 
ther off: the inhabitants of it may hear us, if 
they should happen to be in the arbour, as most 
people are at the present hour of day — in this 
villa, Messer Francesco, lives Monna Tita Mon- 
alda, who tenderly loved Amadeo degi Oricellari." 

In the famous " Conversation " between Sou- 
they and Porson in which occurred the criticism 
of Wordsworth, Southey is represented as saying: 

" Hitherto our sentiments on poetry have been 
delivered down to us from authority ; and if it 
can be demonstrated, as I think it may be, that 
the authority is inadequate, and that the dictates 
are often inapplicable and often misinterpreted, 
you will allow me to remove the cause out of 
court. Every man can see what is very bad in a 
poem ; almost every one can see what is very 
good: but you, Mr. Porson, who have turned 
over all the volumes of all the commentators, 
will inform me whether I am right or wrong in 
asserting that no critic hath yet appeared who 
hath been able to fix or to discern the exact de- 
grees of excellence above a certain point." 

228 



" IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS " 

" None,'* tersely replies Porson. 

" The reason is," rejoined Southey, " because 
the eyes of no one have been upon a level with 
it. Supposing, for the sake of argument, the 
contest of Hesiod and Homer to have taken 
place : the judges who decided in favour of the 
worse, and he, indeed, in the poetry has little 
merit, may have been elegant, wise, and con- 
scientious men. Their decision was in favour of 
that to the species of which they had been the 
most accustomed. Corinna was preferred to 
Pindar no fewer than five times, and the best 
judges in Greece gave her the preference ; yet 
whatever were her powers, and beyond a ques- 
tion they were extraordinary, we may assure 
ourselves that she stood many degrees below 
Pindar." 

Petrarca and Boccaccio were highly esteemed 
by Landor, who did not sympathize with Lord 
Chesterfield in his opinion that the former de- 
served his Laura better than his lauro. The best 
evidence of this predilection is Landor's great 
work, "The Pentameron," second only to his 
greatest, "Pericles and Aspasia." Its couleur 
locale is marvellous. On every page there is a 

229 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

glimpse of cloudless blue sky, a breath of warm 
sunny air, a sketch of Italian manner. The mas- 
terly gusto with which the author enters into the 
spirit of Italy would make us believe him to be 
"the noblest Roman of them all," had he not 
proved himself a better Grecian. Margaret Ful- 
ler realized this when, after comparing the " Pen- 
tameron " and " Petrarca " together, she wrote : 
" I find the prose of the Englishman worthy of the 
verse of the Italian. It is a happiness to see such 
marble beauty in the haUs of a contemporary." 

In " Pericles and Aspasia " one finds the keen- 
est epigrammatic expression of Landor, as in such 
lines as these : — 

" Like the ocean, love embraces the earth ; and 
by love, as by the ocean, whatever is sordid and 
unsound is borne away." 

" It is a casket not precious in itself, but val- 
uable in proportion to what fortune, or industry, 
or virtue, has placed within it." 

" Some tell us that there were twenty Homers, 
some deny that there was ever one. We are per- 
petually laboring to destroy our delight, our com- 

230 



"IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS" 

posure, our devotion to superior power. Of all the 
animals upon earth, we least know what is good 
for us. My opinion is, that what is best for us 
is our admiration of good. No man living vene- 
rates Homer more than I do." 

The nobility of the counsel which Landor 
was able to offer is impressively revealed in 
the following paragraph from the " Pericles and 
Aspasia : " — 

" If any young man would win to himself the 
hearts of the wise and brave, and is ambitious of 
being the guide and leader of them, let him be 
assured that his virtue will give him power and 
power will consolidate and maintain his virtue. 
Let him never then squander away the inesti- 
mable hours of youth in tangled and trifling dis- 
quisitions with such as perhaps have an interest 
in perverting or unsettling his opinions. But let 
him start from them with alacrity, and walk forth 
with firmness : let him early take an interest in 
the business and concerns of men ; and let him, as 
he goes along, look steadfastly at the images of 
those who have benefited his country and make 
with himself a solemn compact to stand hereafter 
among them." 

231 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Again we find : — 

" But take care to offend no philosopher of any 
sect whatever. Indeed to offend any person is 
the next foohsh thing to being offended. I never 
do it unless when it is requisite to discredit some- 
body who might otherwise have the influence to 
diminish my estimation. Politeness is not always 
a sign of wisdom, but the want of it always leaves 
room for suspicion of folly, if folly and impru- 
dence are the same." 

Regarding art, we find Landor sa)dng : — 

" Sculpture and painting are moments of life : 
poetry is life itself, and everything around it and 
above it. ' 

And of poetry he also says : — 

" No writer of florid prose ever was more than a 
secondary poet. Poetry in her high estate is de- 
lighted with exuberant abundance, but imposes 
on her worshipper a severity of selection. She 
has not only her days of festival, but also her 
days of abstinence and, unless on some that are 
set apart, prefers the graces of sedateness to the 
revelry of enthusiasm. She rejects, as inharmo- 

232 



« IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS " 

nious and barbarous, the mimicry of her voice 
and manner by obstreperous sophists, and argute 
grammarians, and she scatters to the winds the 
loose fragments of the schools." 

In an impassioned paragraph Landor writes : — 

" O Pericles I how wrong are all who do not 
forever follow love, under one form or other I 
There is no god but he, the framer, the preserver 
of the world, the pure intelligence I All wisdom 
that is not enlightened and guided by him, is per- 
turbed and perverted. . . . The happy never say, 
and never hear said, farewell." 

The dialogue between Vittoria Colonna and 
Michael Angelo offers such paragraphs as these : 

" The beautiful in itself is useful by awaking 
our finer sensibilities, which it must be our own 
fault if we do not often carry with us into action. 
A well-ordered mind touches no branch of intel- 
lectual pleasure so brittle and incompUant as never 
to be turned to profit." ^ 

And again : — 

" Homer left a highway, over-shadowed with 
lofty trees and perennial leafage, between the re- 

233 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

gions of Allegory and Olympus. The gloom of 
Dante is deeper, and the boundaries even more 
indiscernible. We know the one is censured for 
it ; perhaps the other was." 

Regarding greatness, Vittoria is represented as 
saying : — 

" There are various kinds of greatness, as we 
all know ; however, the most part of those who 
profess one species is ready to acknowledge no 
other. The first and chief is intellectual. But 
surely those also are to be admitted into the num- 
ber of the eminently great, who move large masses 
by action, by throwing their own ardent minds 
into the midst of popular assemblies or conflict- 
ing armies, compelling, directing, and subjecting. 
This greatness is indeed far from so desirable as 
that which shines serenely from above, to be our 
hope, comfort, and guidance : to lead us in spirit 
from a world of sad realities into one fresh from 
the poet's hand, and blooming with all the variety 
of his creation. Hence the most successful gen- 
erals, and the most powerful kings will always be 
considered by the judicious and dispassionate as 
invested with less dignity, less extensive and en- 

234. 



" IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS " 

during authority than great philosophers and great 
poets." 

One of those keen aphorisms in which Landor 
abounds is thus expressed : — 

" Little men, like httle birds, are always at- 
tracted and caught by false lights." 

Landor's appreciation of Shakespeare was fine 
and profound. " A great poet represents a great 
portion of the human race," he said. " Nature 
delegated to Shakespeare the interests and direc- 
tion of the whole." 

In the context Landor added that " to Milton 
was given a smaller part, but with plenary power 
over it, and such fervor and majesty of eloquence 
was bestowed on him as on no other mortal in 
any age." 

The mental processes of Landor in poetic 
creation and also in the construction of the 
" Imaginary Conversations," invite attention. Sir 
Joshua Reynolds once scraped a painting by 
Titian in an endeavor to learn the secret of his 
coloring ; the- critical reader of Landor cannot 
but long to find an equally intimate approach to 
the structural quality of his work. In a letter 

235 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

written to John Forster in October of 1838, Lan- 
dor himself refers to his creative processes as 
follows : — 

"... On Sunday I began a drama on Gio- 
vanna di Napoli (God defend us from the horrid 
sound, Joan of Naples I ), and before I rose 
from my bed on Monday morning, 1 had written 
above a hundred and seventy verses, as good as 
any I ever wrote in my hfe, excepting my 
* Death of Clytemnestra.' Of course I slept little. 
In fact, I scarcely sleep at all by night, while the 
people of my brain are talking. While others 
are drinking I doze and dream. . . . 

"... It is odd enough that I had written a 
good many scraps of two * Imaginary Conversa- 
tions ' in which Giovanna is a speaker ; but I 
cannot remember a syllable of them, nor would 
they do. She and Vittoria Colonna are my 
favorites among the women of Italy, as Boc- 
caccio and Petrarca are among the men. But, 
to have clear perceptions of women, to elicit 
their thoughts, and hear their voices to advantage, 
I must be in the open air, in the sun — alas, in 
Italy, were it possible, my sprained ankle will 
not let me take my long and rapid strides. I 

236 



"IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS" 

am an artificial man. I want all these helps for 
poetry. Quiet and silent nights are the next 
things needful." 

Of the creation of his tragedy, " Andrea of 
Hungary," Landor writes that it was " conceived, 
planned, and executed in thirteen days ; tran- 
scribed (the worst of the business) in six. Any 
man, I am now convinced," he continues, " may 
write a dozen such within the year. The worst of 
it is, in anything dramatic, such is the rapidity of 
passion the words escape before they can be 
taken down. If you lose one you lose the tone 
of the person and never can recover it. . . . 
And the action is gone too. You have a dead 
man before you — but galvanized." 

The " Imaginary Conversation " between 
Southey and Porson first appeared (in 1823) in 
the " London Magazine." The Dialogue that 
has Elizabeth and Burleigh for its speakers,' 
has been called " a masterpiece of humor and 
character." In all, Landor wrote one hun- 
dred and fifty of these " Conversations." John 
Forster, commenting on them, remarks that 
it is their "unity in the astonishing variety, 
the fire of an irrepressible genius running 

237 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

through the whole," that gives to them a place 
among books not Hkely to pass away. Mr. 
Forster adds : — 

" The intensity and the range of mental power 
sufficiently declare themselves. There is scarcely 
a form of the human mind, serious or sprightly, 
imaginative, historical, fanciful, or real, which 
has not been brought into play in this extraor- 
dinary series of writings. When Emerson had 
made the book his companion for more than 
twenty years, he publicly expressed to Landor 
his gratitude for having given him a resource 
that had never failed him in solitude. He had 
but to turn to its rich and ample page to find 
always free and sustained thought, a keen and 
precise understanding, an industrious observation 
in every department of life, an experience to 
which it might seem that nothing had occurred 
in vain, honor for every just and generous senti- 
ment, and a scourge like that of the Furies for 
every oppressor, whether public or private. 
Emerson pronounced Landor to be one of the 
foremost of that small class who make good 
in the nineteenth century the claims of pure 
literature." 

238 



" IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS " 

Wordsworth gave high appreciation to the 
" Conversations " and wrote to Landor saying, 
" Your dialogues are worthy of you, and a great 
acquisition to literature." 

A friend of Landor 's expressed surprise one 
day on hearing him praise Alfieri, as he had 
seemed, in a note appended to the " Conversa- 
tion between Galileo, Milton, and a Dominican," 
to entertain a very different opinion of this poet. 
Reading the note referred to, Landor seemed to 
be greatly annoyed, and replied : " This is a mis- 
take. It was never my intention to condemn 
Alfieri so sweepingly ; " and a few days later he 
made the following correction : " Keats, in whom 
the spirit of poetry was stronger than in any 
contemporary, at home or abroad, delighted in 
Hellenic imagery and mythology, displaying 
them admirably ; but no poet came nearer than 
Alfieri to the heroic, since Virgil. Disliking, 
as I do, prefaces and annotations, excrescences 
which hang loose like the deciduous bark on a 
plane-tree, I will here notice an omission of mine 
on Alfieri, in the * Imaginary Conversations.' 
The words, * There is not a glimpse of poetry in 
his Tragedies, should be, as written, ' There is not 
an extraneous gUmpsey &;c." 

239 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Later, Landor addressed these Knes to Alfieri : 

" Thou art present in my sight. 
Though far removed from us, for thou alone 
Hast touched the inmost fibres of the breast, 
Since Tasso's tears made damper the damp floor 
Whereon one only light came through the bars," &c. ; 

thus redeeming the former note that misrepre- 
sented his real attitude toward the Itahan poet. 
The " Imaginary Conversations " are often 
brilhant and scintillating, often profound, and 
almost invariably epigrammatic in expression. 
Even as late in his life as January of 1861, 
Landor is meditating on another " Conversa- 
tion," — one between Virgil and Horace ; and this 
he wrote in time for publication that spring when 
it appeared in the Athengeum. So these wonder- 
ful creations range over all times and topics. 
Garibaldi and Mazzini discuss, with emphasis 
half sad, half cynical, French honor and French 
veracity ; Tasso and Leonora di Esti meet and she 
implores her unfortunate lover to forget her, and 
dies happy with his assurance that he never can ; 
Sophocles and Pericles wander in Athens and 
the loyal enthusiasm of Pericles for his friend is 
eloquently expressed ; Washington and Franklin 
meet and discuss the free spirit of American 

240 



" IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS " 

institutions ; Sir Philip Sidney and Greville dis- 
cuss poetry ; Dante and Beatrice meet, and Han- 
nibal and Marcellus. Alfieri and Salomon 
discuss Galileo, and the great Italian poet says ; 
" Since the destruction of the republic, Florence 
"has produced only one great man, Gahleo, and 
abandoned him to every indignity that fanaticism 
and despotism could invent. Extraordinary 
men, like the stones that are formed in the 
nigher regions of the air, fall upon the earth only 
to be broken and cast into the furnace. The 
precursor of Newton hved in the deserts of the 
moral world, drank water, and ate locusts and 
wild honey. It was fortunate that his head also 
was not lopped off: had a singer asked it, instead 
of a dancer, it would have been." 

" In fact it was," replies Salomon : " for the 
fruits of it were shaken down and thrown away : 
he was forbidden to publish the most important 
of his discoveries, and the better part of his 
manuscripts was burned after his death." 

" I would only persuade you," rejoins Alfieri, 
" that banter, pun, and quibble are the properties 
of light men and shallow capacities ; that genuine 
humour and true wit require a sound and capa- 
cious mind, which is always a grave one. Con- 

16 241 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

temptuousness is not incompatible with them : 
worthless is that man who feels no contempt for 
the worthless, and weak who treats their empti- 
ness as a thing of weight. At first it may seem 
a paradox, but it is perfectly true, that the 
gravest nations have been the wittiest; and in 
those nations some of the gravest men. In Eng- 
land, Swift and Addison, in Spain, Cervantes. 
Rabelais and La Fontaine are recorded by their 
countrymen to have been reveurs. Few men 
have been graver than Pascal ; few have been 
wittier." 

Landor , represents one " Conversation " as 
taking place between himself and Delille, in 
which he expresses his own views on poetry in 
these words : — 

" In poetry, there is a greater difference be- 
tween the good and the excellent than there is 
between the bad and the good. Poetry has no 
golden mean ; mediocrity here is of another metal, 
which Voltaire, however, had skill enough to en- 
crust and polish. In the least wretched of his 
tragedies, whatever is tolerable is Shakespeare's ; 
but, gracious Heaven ! how deteriorated ! When 
he pretends to extol a poet he chooses some 

242 



« IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS " 

defective part, and renders it more so whenever 
he translates it. I will repeat a few verses from 
Metastasio in support of my assertion. Metas- 
tasio was both a better critic and a better poet, 
although of the second order in each quality; 
his tyrants are less philosophical, and his chamber- 
maids less dogmatic. Voltaire was, however, a 
man of abilities, and author of many passable 
epigrams, beside those which are contained in 
his tragedies and heroics ; yet it must be con- 
fessed that, like your Parisian lackeys, they are 
usually the smartest when out of place." 

To which Delille says in reply : — 

" What you call epigram gives life and spirit 
to grave works, and seems principally wanted to 
relieve a long poem. I do not see why what 
pleases us in a star should not please us in a 
constellation." 

These " Conversations " offer the most re- 
markably wide range of intellectual interest; 
they are often choice in quality ; they are of an 
order of literature which has impressed the criti- 
cal mind profoundly, and the mind of the general 
reader very slightly. For one of the really great 

243 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

authors, Landor's work is curiously unfamiliar 
to a large proportion of even very cultivated 
readers, — those whose impressions and opinions 
are on no account to be ruled out as having no 
value. While literature is by no means without 
its grave faults of cheap popularity that some- 
times obscures high excellence, yet popularity, 
in the sense of a very wide and warm recogni- 
tion, is not to be despised. The power to 
touch the popular mind is the first element of 
that universality which pre-determines greatness. 
It is the power to generate a living energy, the 
power to communicate vital truth in a man- 
ner so sympathetic, so swift in its recognition 
of the spiritual nature, as to be able to touch 
and arouse and inspire all that is noblest in 
humanity. Landor was a poet for poets. He 
was a classicist for classic scholars ; but an 
author's true greatness can only be measured by 
the degree in which he enters into sympathy 
with the force and the mass of human character. 
It can only be measured by the comprehensive- 
ness of his grasp, the breadth of his sympathies, 
the capacity to love men that he may thereby 
help them. The author who is worthy to be 
classed among the immortals is he who touches 

244- 



" IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS " 

life with spiritual power. The great fact in Ufe 
is its divine destiny, and he is greatest of all who 
most significantly and sympathetically interprets 
and illuminates this destiny. 

However superior in quality may be the 
'"saving remnant," it is yet more profoundly 
true that real greatness lies in the more universal 
appeal ; in the possession of that marvellous 
power of vital imagination which conceives of 
life in its wholeness. Far greater than Hterature 
is life. 

" It may be glorious to write 
Thoughts that shall glad the two or three 
High souls, like those far stars that come in sight 
Once in a century ; 

" But better far it is to speak 
One simple word which, now and then, 
Shall waken their free natures in the weak 
And friendless sons of men." 



It is not, therefore, the fact that Landor's au- 
dience was few though fit, — that his appeal is 
to the more highly cultured rather than to all 
humanity, — which is recorded to its credit. On 
the contrary, it is here that his defects and 
failures lie. No man, no author, is truly great 

245 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

until his entire intellectual life is fused with his 
moral life; until every gift and grace is trans- 
figured into that spirituality that gives freely of 
love and sympathy to all ; that is filled with all 
high interests and is characterized by forgetful- 
ness of self and remembrance of others. These 
are lessons that awaited Walter Savage Landor 
farther on in the processes of unfoldment ^fter 
leaving this world for the life more abundant. 
Yet that great thoughts were his daily food, is 
true : and his undisciplined temper, violent and 
unreasonable as were often its manifestations, 
still never degenerated into any petty meanness, 
or any lasting malevolence. " Humanity at best 
is weak and can only be divine by flashes," said 
Kate Field of Landor, in writing of his last days, 
and she added : " The Pythia was a stupid old 
woman, saving when she sat upon the tripod. 
Seeing genius to the best advantage in its work, 
— not always but most frequently, — they are 
wisest who love the artist without demanding 
personal perfection. It is rational to conclude 
that the loftiest possible genius should be allied 
to the most perfect specimen of man, heart hold- 
ing equal sway with head. A great man, how- 
ever, need not be a great artist, — that is, of 

246 



"IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS" 

course, understood ; but time ought to prove 
that the highest form of art can only emanate 
from the noblest type of humanity. The most 
glorious inspirations must flow through the 
purest channels. But this is the genius of the 
future, as far removed from what is best known 
as order is removed from chaos." 

So swift has been the march of ethical ideals 
that what appeared in the latter quarter of the 
nineteenth century as the vision of the future is 
almost, in these early years of the twentieth 
century, the practical working ideal of to-day. 

The early literary experience of Landor was 
steeped in no little stress and storm, although 
largely, it is true, these tumults were of his own 
creation. " Landor's characteristic fault," writes 
Kate Field, " was that of a temper so undisci- 
plined and impulsive as to be somewhat hurri- 
canic in its consequences, though not unlike the 
Australian boomerang, it frequently returned 
whence it came, and injured no one but the 
possessor. Circumstances aggravated, rather 
than diminished, this Landorian idiosyncrasy. 
Born in prosperity, heir to a large landed estate, 
and educated in aristocratic traditions, Walter 
Savage Landor began life without a struggle, 

247 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

and throughout a long career remained master 
of the situation, independent of the world and 
its favors. Perhaps too much freedom is as 
unfortunate in its results upon character as too 
much dependence. A nature to be properly 
developed should receive as well as give." 

It is true, however, that with all his vehe- 
mence, his impatience, and his impetuosity, Lan- 
dor united great courtesy, great gentleness, and 
tenderness of heart. Edward Dowden says of 
him that the times " wheii other men would be 
incapacitated by tremulous hand or throbbing 
brow for pure and free imagining and dehcate 
manipulation, were precisely the productive 
periods with Landor. Not that he transmuted 
his dross of life into gold of art, or taught in song 
what he had learnt in suffering ; rather, he would 
hsten to no lessons of suffering, but escaped from 
them into the arms of joy. Among these apparent 
inconsistencies of Landor's character that one is 
especially noteworthy which is indicated by the 
presence of so much disorder and disproportion 
in his conduct of life (if conduct it can be 
called), and in the opinions and sentiments ex- 
pressed in not a little of what he wrote, and the 
presence of so much order, proportion, and har- 

248 



"IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS" 

mony in the form of his artistic products — so 
much austere strength in some, so much beauty 
in others, which would be recognised as severe 
if it were not so absolutely beautiful." It was 
in such an hour as this that he wrote the 
stanza : — 

" I strove with none ; for none was worth my strife. 
Nature I loved, and after Nature, Art ; 
I warmed both hands before the fire of life. 
It sinks, and I am ready to depart." 

Although Landor's work appeals to the few 
rather than to the many, he was yet an ardent 
lover of liberty, an intense sympathizer with 
the larger life and greater opportunities for the 
people. In his admiration for Garibaldi, Maz- 
zini, Cavour, and Kossuth, he was fairly a hero 
worshipper. His " Imaginary Conversation " be- 
tween Savonarola and the Prior of Florence 
was written with the object of devoting its pro- 
ceeds to the aid of Garibaldi's troops. Those 
who have cared for Landor, however, make up 
in zeal what they lack in numbers. Words- 
worth, Lamb, Southey, and Shelley spoke and 
wrote of him with the utmost enthusiasm. Mrs. 
Browning declared that if it were not for the 
necessity of getting through a book, some of the 

249 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

pages of the " Pentameron " were too delicious 
to turn over. 

Swinburne pronounces on Landor an incom- 
parable verdict. " In the course of his long 
life," writes the younger poet of the elder, "he 
had won for himself such a crown of glory in 
verse and in prose as has been won by no other 
Englishman but Milton." As a poet, Mr. Swin- 
burne assigns to Landor a place between Byron 
and Shelley, " as far above the former as below 
the latter," and he adds : " If we except Catullus 
and Simonides, it might be hard to match, and 
it would be impossible to over-match, the flaw- 
less and blameless, yet living and breathing 
beauty of his most perfect elegies, epigrams, and 
epitaphs. . . . His passionate compassion, his 
bitter and burning pity for all wrongs endured 
in all the world found only their natural outlet 
in his hfelong defence of tyrannicide as the last 
resource of baffled justice, the last discharge of 
heroic duty. . . . He was surely the most gentle 
and generous, as the most headstrong and hot- 
headed of heroes or of men. Nor ever was any 
man's best work more thoroughly imbued and 
informed with evidence of his noblest qualities. 
His loyalty and liberality of heart were as 

250 



« IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS " 

inexhaustible as his bounty and beneficence of 
hand." 

Turning from his personal character to his 
work, Mr. Swinburne finely says: "On either 
side, immediately or hardly below his mighty 
masterpiece of * Pericles and Aspasia,' stand the 
two scarcely less beautiful and vivid studies of 
mediaeval Italy and Shakespearean England. The 
very finest flower of his immortal dialogues is 
probably to be found in the ' Imaginary Con- 
versations of Greeks and Romans ; ' his utmost 
command of passion and pathos may be tested 
by their transcendent success in the distilled and 
concentrated tragedy of * Tiberius and Virginia,' 
where for once he shows a quality more proper 
to romantic than classical imagination, — the 
subtle and sublime and terrible power to enter 
the dark vestibule of distraction, to throw the 
whole force of his fancy, the whole fire of his 
spirit into the shadowing passion (as Shakespeare 
calls it) of gradually imminent insanity. " 

Of the " Conversation " wherein Cicero is 
mtroduced, John Forster, Landor's biographer, 
finely says: — 

" It would nevertheless be difficult, filled as it 
is with sayings Ciceronian, to exhibit their im- 

251 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

pressiveness by extracting even the best of them. 
The conversation is so infinitely better than any- 
thing that can be taken from it. It unfolds 
itself in such fine gradations as the brothers 
walk along the shore, their thoughts toned and 
tempered by skyey influences, and their spirits 
drawn nearer not more by conscious remem- 
brance of the past than by that dim foreboding 
of some coming change, the forecast of a final 
quiet to which both are drawing near, which so 
often accompanies the approach of death. The 
very mildness of the winter evening, with a 
softness in its moist, still air aUied to the gentle- 
ness of sorrow, plays its part in the dialogue. 
As they retrace their steps, the purple light that 
had invested the cliffs and shore has faded off, 
and the night quite suddenly closes in ; of the 
promontories, the long, irregular breakers under 
them, the little solitary Circasan hill, the neigh- 
boring whiter rocks of Anxur, the spot where 
the mother of the Gracchi lived, nothing further 
is discernible ; all the nobleness of the surround- 
ing or the far-off landscape, recalling scenes of 
friendship and recollections^ of greatness, has 
passed away ; they see now but the darkness of 
the ignoble present, and as, on reaching home, 

252 



« IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS " 

they notice the servants lighting the lamps in 
the villa and making preparation for the birth- 
day on the morrow, the thought at length con- 
sciously arises to Marcus whether that coming 
birthday, least pleasurable to him as it must be, 
may not also be his last. " 

Like Emerson, Landor was accustomed to 
compose in the open air. In one of his " Con- 
versations " he represents Epicurus as saying : 

" I assemble and arrange my thoughts, with 
freedom and with pleasure in the fresh air and 
open sky ; and they are more lively and vigorous 
and exuberant when I catch them as I walk about 
and commune with them in silence and seclusion." 

And of himself Landor once said ; " It is my 
practice, and ever has been, to walk quite alone. 
In my walks I collect my arguments, arrange my 
sentences, and utter them aloud. Eloquence 
with me can do little else in the city than put 
on her bracelets, tighten her sandals, and show 
herself to the people. Her health and vigor and 
beauty, if she has any, are the fruits of the open 
fields." 

Landor was especially felicitous in his atmos- 

253 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

phere in those of his " Conversations " where 
Greek characters were introduced. His mind 
was essentially Grecian in its cast. Of the 
" Pericles and Aspasia," Elizabeth Barrett said, 
as early as in 1839, that it revealed Landor to 
be, of all Hving writers, " the most unconven- 
tional in thought and word, the most classical, 
because the freest from mere classicalism, the 
most Greek, because pre-eminently and purely 
English, and the fittest of all to achieve what 
Plato calls a triumph in eloquence, the success- 
ful commendation of Athens in the midst of the 
Peloponnesus." 

Traditions have drifted down, even to the 
Florence of to-day, of the appearance of Landor 
wandering alone on the Fiesolan hilTs, com- 
posing his wonderful " Conversations " aloud. 
The picture is one to record itself in memory. 
The ancient Etruscan wall that still guards the 
southern side of the slope ; the old Palazzo 
Pretorio, filled with vases, lamps, coins, and mar- 
bles found in the excavations at Fiesole ; the 
Franciscan monastery occupying the site of the 
old Acropolis of Faesute, and the church of 
San Alessandro standing now as Landor knew 
them and as they have stood for centuries ; and 

254 



'IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS" 

the beautiful view of the valley of Florence 
spread out below, from the Carrara to the Cas- 
entino — here the loiterer may stiU see in fancy 
the majestic form of the poet as he walked alone 
and rehearsed aloud to himself, in the freedom 
and solitude of the open air, these dialogues of 
his famous creation. Literally, he seemed to 
speak them into being. He may have wandered 
into the gardens of the Medici among the an- 
tique statues that the great Lorenzo loved. With 
his genius in harmony with itself, as it was in 
those hours of creation, the entire atmosphere 
was all wings and flowers, and a strangeness, like 
that which invests the blossoming of the aloe, 
stiU thrills the landscape in these pictures of 
fancy that pervade the haunts of Boccaccio and 
of Walter Savage Landor. In the conversation 
between Alfieri and Salomon, Landor makes Al- 
fieri say : — 

" Look from the window. That cottage on 
the declivity was Dante's. That square and 
large mansion, with a circular garden before it 
elevated artificially, was the first scene of Boc- 
caccio's Decameron. A boy might stand at an 
equal distance between them, and break the win- 

255 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

dows of each with his shng. ... A town so little 
that the voice of a cabbage-girl in the midst of 
it may be heard at the extremities, reared within 
three centuries a greater number of citizens il- 
lustrious for their genius than all the remainder 
of the Continent (excepting her sister Athens) 
in six thousand years. Smile as you will, Signor 
Conte, what must I think of a city where Mi- 
chael Angelo, Frate Bartolommeo, Ghiberte (who 
formed them), Guicciardini, and Machiavelli were 
secondary men ? And certainly such were they, 
if we compare them with Galileo and Boccaccio 
and Dante." 

It is one of those beautiful correspondences in 
life that in the very heart of the romantic valley 
where Boccaccio had placed his Lago deUe Belle 
Donne, Landor came to possess the villa that 
was surrounded by the scenes forever associated 
with Lorenzo il Magnifico and the brilliant 
galaxy of scholars, including the great and good 
Pico della Mirandola, that Lorenzo drew about 
him. There was a radiant magnetic line of se- 
quences running through Landor's entire life that 
reveal themselves impressively through the per- 
spective of time. 

256 



God's prophets of the Beautiful 
These poets ivere. . . . 

If all the crowns of earth must wound 
With prickings of the thorns He found, — 
If saddest sighs swell sweetest sound, — 

What say ye unto this ? — refuse 
The baptism in salt water ? — choose 
Calm breasts, mute lips, and labour loose f 

" Or, ye gifted givers ! ye 

Who give your liberal hearts to me 
To make the world this harmony, 

" Are ye resigned that they be spent 
To such world's help ? " The Spirits bent 
Their a7vful brows and said ' Conte?it.' " 

" Glory to God — to God ! " he saith, 
" Knowledge by suffering entereth. 
And Life is perfected by Death." 

EuzABETH Barrett Browning. 

Not with disdain of days that were 

Look earthward now ; 
Let dreams revive the reverend hair, 
The imperial brow ; 
17 257 



Come back in sleep, for in the life 

Where thou art not 
We find none like thee. Time and strife 

And the world's lot 

Move thee no more ; but love at least 

And reverent heart 
May move thee, royal and released 
Soul, as thou art. 

Algernon Charles Swinburne. 
In memory of Walter Savage Landor. 



258 



VII 

THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife ; 

Nature I loved, and after Nature, Art ; 
I warmed both hands before the fire of life ; 

It sinks, and I am ready to depart. 

Walter Savage Landor. 

The closing years of Landor's life were a veri- 
table twilight of the gods, shot through with 
golden rays from the tender courtesies and 
beautiful kindness of the Brownings and the 
Storys. Their friendship sustained his last 
lonely years and made them, indeed, in many 
ways, the fairest of all his earthly experiences. 
The portrait of Mr. Landor, painted when he 
was eighty years of age and reproduced as the 
frontispiece of this volume, is the work of Charles 
Caryll Coleman, who was then a young art- 
student in Italy. It was painted for Kate 
Field, who thus narrates the preliminary con- 
versation : — 

259 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

"'Mr. Landor, do you remember the young 
artist who called on you one day?' 

" * Yes, and a nice fellow he seemed to be.' 

" ' He was greatly taken with your head.' 

" (Humorously.) * You are quite sure he was 
not smitten with my face ? ' 

" * No, I am not sure, for he expressed himself 
enthusiastically about your beard. He says you 
are a fine subject for a study.' 

" No answer. 

" * Would you allow him to make a sketch of 
you, Mr. Landor ? He is exceedingly anxious 
to do so.' 

" ' No ; I do not wish my face to be public 
property. I detest this publicity that men now- 
a-days seem to be so fond of. There is a paint- 
ing of me in England. D'Orsay, too, made a 
drawing of me ' (I think he said drawing) * once 
when I was visiting Gore House, — a very good 
thing it was, too, — and there is a bust executed 
by Gibson when I was in Rome. These are 
quite sufficient. I have often been urged to al- 
low my portrait to- be inserted in my books, but 
never would I give my consent.' (Notwith- 
standing this assertion, it may be found in the 
* Last Fruit.') * It is a custom that I detest.' 

260 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

" ' But, Mr. Landor, you had your photograph 
taken lately.' 

" * That was to oblige my good friend Brown- 
ing, who has been so exceedingly kind and atten- 
tive to me. I could not refuse him.' 

"*But, Mr. Landor, this is entirely between 
ourselves. It does not concern the public in the 
least. My friend wants to make a study of your 
head, and I want the study.' 

" ' Oh, the painting is for you, is it ? ' 

" ' Yes. I want to have something of you in 
oil colors.' 

" * Ah, to be sure ! the old creature's complex- 
ion is so fresh and fair. Well, I '11 tell you what 
I will do. Your friend may come, provided you 
come with him, — and act as chaperon ! ' This 
was said laughingly. 

" ' That I will do with pleasure.' 

" * But stop ! ' added Landor after a pause. ' I 
must be taken without my beard ! ' 

" ' Oh, no ! Mr. Landor, that cannot be. Why, 
you will spoil the picture. You won't look like 
a patriarch without a beard.' 

" * I ordered my barber to come and shear 
me to-morrow. The weather is getting to 
be very warm, and a heavy beard is exceed- 

261 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

ingly uncomfortable. I must be shaved to- 
morrow.' 

" * Pray countermand the order, dear Mr. Lan- 
dor. Do retain your beard until the picture is 
completed. You will not be obliged to wait 
long. We shall all be so disappointed if you 
don't.' 

" * Well, well, I suppose I must submit.' 

" And thus the matter was amicably arranged, 
to our infinite satisfaction. 

" Those sittings were very pleasant to the artist 
and his chaperon, and were not disagreeable, I 
think, to the model. Seated in his arm-chair, 
with his back to the window that the light 
might fall on the top of his head and form a sort 
of glory, Landor looked every inch a seer, and 
would entertain us with interesting though un- 
seerlike recollections, while the artist was busy 
with his brush." 

Landor frequently passed an evening at Casa 
Guidi with his devoted friends, and of one of 
these occasions Miss Field relates the following 
story : — 

"Apropos of old songs, Landor has laid his 
offering upon their neglected altar. 1 shall not 

262 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

forget that evening at Casa Guidi, — I can for- 
get no evening passed there, — when, just as the 
tea was being placed upon the table, Robert 
Browning turned to Landor, who was that night's 
honored guest, gracefully thanked him for his de- 
fence of old songs, and, opening the ' Last Fruit,' 
read in his clear, manly voice the following pas- 
sages from the Idyls of Theocritus : ' We often 
hear that such or such a thing is not worth an 
old song. Alas ! how very few things are ! What 
precious recollections do some of them awaken ! 
what pleasurable tears do they excite ! They 
purify the stream of life ; they can delay it on 
its shelves and rapids ; they can turn it back 
again to the soft moss amidst which its sources 
issue.' 

" * Ah, you are kind,' replied the gratified author. 
' You always find out the best bits in my books.' 

"I have never seen anything of its kind so chi- 
valric as the deference paid by Robert Browning 
to Walter Savage Landor. It was loyal homage 
rendered by a poet, in all the glow of power and 
impulsive magnetism, to 'an old master.'" 

Out of her memories of these social evenings 
with the Brownings and Landor, Miss Field also 
writes : — 

263 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

"Landor entertained a genuine affection for the 
memory of Lady Blessington. 'Ah, there was a 
woman ! ' he exclaimed one day with a sigh. ' I 
never knew so brilliant and witty a person in 
conversation. She was most generous too, and 
kind-hearted. I never heard her make an ill- 
natured remark. It was my custom to visit her 
whenever the laurel was in bloom ; and as the 
season approached, she would wi'ite me a note, 
saying, " Gore House expects you, for the laurel 
has begun to blossom." I never see laurel now, 
that it does not make me sad, for it recalls her 
to me so vividly. During these visits I never 
saw Lady Blessington until dinner-time. She 
always breakfasted in her ovni room, and wrote 
during the morning. She wrote very well, too ; 
her style was pure. In the evening her drawing- 
room was thrown open to her friends, except 
when she attended the opera. Her opera-box 
faced the Queen's and a formidable rival she was 
to her Majesty.' 

" D'Orsay was an Apollo in beauty, very ami- 
able, and had considerable talent for modelling. 
Taking me into his little back sitting-room, Lan- 
dor brought out a small album, and, passing over 
the likenesses of several old friends, among whom 

264. 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

were Southey, Porson, Napier, and other celebri- 
ties, he held up an engraving of Lady Blessing- 
ton. Upon my remarking its beauty, Landor 
replied : ' That was taken at the age of fifty, so 
you can imagine how beautiful she must have 
been in her youth. Her voice and laugh were 
very musical.' Then, turning to a young lady 
present, Landor made her an exceedingly neat 
compliment, by saying, ' Your voice reminds me 
very vividly of Lady Blessington's. Perhaps,' 
he continued with a smile, 'this is the reason why 
my old, deaf ears never lose a word when you 
are speaking.' Driving along the north side of 
the Arno one summer's day, Landor gazed sadly 
at a terrace overlooking the water, and said : 
* Many a delightful evening have I spent on that 
terrace with Lord and Lady Blessington. There 
we used to take our tea. They once visited 
Florence for no other purpose than to see me. 
Was not that friendly? They are both dead 
now, and I am doomed to live on. When Lady 
Blessington died, I was asked to write a Latin 
epitaph for her tomb, which I did ; but some 
officious person thought to improve the Latin 
before it was engraved, and ruined it.' 

" This friendship was fully reciprocated by Lady 

265 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Blessington, who, in her letters to Landor, refers 
no less than three times to those ' calm nights on 
the terrace of the Casa Pelosi.' * I send you,' she 
writes, the * engraving, and have only to wish that 
it may sometimes remind you of the original. 
.... Five fleeting years have gone by since 
our delicious evenings on the lovely Arno, — 
evenings never to be forgotten, and the recol- 
lections of which ought to cement the friendships 
then formed.' Again, in her books of travel, — 
the * Idler in France' and ' Idler in Italy,' — Lady 
Blessington pays the very highest tribute to 
Landor's heart, as well as intellect, and declares 
his real conversations to be quite as delightful as 
his imaginary ones. She who will live long in 
history as the friend of great men now lies be- 
neath the chestnut shade of Saint Germain ; and 
Landor, with the indignation of one who loved 
her, has turned to D'Orsay, asking — 

" ' Who was it squandered all her wealth. 
And swept away the bloom of health ? ' 

" One day," continues Miss Field, in her rem- 
iniscences of the Landor days, " the conversation 
turned to Aubrey De Vere, the beautiful Catho- 
lic poet of Ireland, whose name is scarcely 

266 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

known on this side of the Atlantic. This is our 
loss, though De Vere can never be a popular 
poet for his muse lives in the past and breathes 
ether rather than air. *De Vere is charming, 
both as man and as poet,' said Landor enthu- 
siastically, rising as he spoke and leaving the 
room, to return immediately with a small volume 
of De Vere's poems pubhshed at Oxford in 1843. 
* Here are his poems, given to me by himself. 
Such a modest, unassuming man as he is ! Now 
listen to this from the " Ode on the Ascent of 
the Alps." Is it not magnificent ? 

"' "\ spake — Behold her o'er the broad lake flying : 
Like a great Angel missioned to bestow 
Some boon on men beneath in sadness lying : 
The waves are murmuring silver murmurs low : 

Over the waves are borne 
Those feeble lights which, ere the eyes of Mom 
Are lifted, through her lids and lashes flow. 

Beneath the curdling wind 
Green through the shades the waters rush and roll, 
Or whitened only by the unfrequent shoal ; — 
Lo ! two dark hills, with darker yet behind, 
Confront them, purple mountains almost black. 
Each behind each self-folded and withdrawn 
Beneath the umbrage of yon cloudy rack — 

That orange gleam ! 't is dawn ! 
Onward ! the swan's flight with the eagle's blending. 
On, winged Muse ; still forward and ascending ! " 
267 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

" ' This sonnet on Sunrise,' continued Landor, 
' is the noblest that ever was written : — 

" ' " I saw the Master of the Sun. He stood 

High in his luminous car, himself more bright. 

An Archer of immeasurable might ; 

On his left shoulder hung his quivered load ; 

Spurned by his Steeds the eastern mountain glowed ; 

Forward his eager eye and brow of light 

He bent ; and while both hands that arch embowed. 

Shaft after shaft pursued the flying Night. 

No wings profaned that godlike form : around 

His neck high held an ever-moving crowd 

Of locks hung glistening ; while such perfect sound 

Fell from his bowstrings that th' ethereal dome 

Thrilled as a dew-drop ; and each passing cloud 

Expanded, whitening like the ocean foam." 

" * Is not this hne grand ? — 

" Peals the strong, voluminous thunder ! " 

And how incomparable is the termination of this 
song I — 

" Bright was her soul as Dian's crest 
Showering on Vesta's fane its sheen : 
Cold looked she as the waveless breast 
Of some stone Dian at thirteen. 
Men loved : but hope they deemed to be 
A sweet Impossibility ! " 

Here are two beautiful lines from the Grecian 
Ode: — 

268 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

" Those sinuous streams that blushing wander 
Through labyrinthine oleander." 

This is like Shakespeare : — 

" Yea, and the Queen of Love, as fame reports. 
Was caught, — no doubt in Bacchic wreaths — for Bacchus 
Such puissance hath, that he old oaks will twine 
Into true-lovers' knots, and laughing stand 
Until the sun goes down." 

And an admirable passage is this, too, from the 
same poem, " The Search after Proserpine " : 

''Yea and the motions of her trees and harvests 
Resemble those of slaves, reluctant, slow. 
By outward force compelled ; not like our hillows, 
Springing elastic in impetuous joy, 
Or indolently swayed." 

" ' There I ' exclaimed Landor, closing the book, 
' I want you to have this. It will be none the 
less valuable because I have scribbled in it,' he 
added with a smile. 

" ' But, Mr. Landor — ' 

" ' Now don't say a word. I am an old man, 
and if both my legs are not in the grave, they 
ought to be. I cannot lay up such treasures in 
heaven, you know, — saving of course in my 
memory, — and De Vere had rather you should 

269 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

have it than the rats. There 's a compliment for 
you I so put the book in your pocket.' 

" This Httle volume is marked throughout by 
Lander with notes of admiration, and if I here 
transcribe a few of his favorite poems, it will be 
with the hope of benefiting many readers to 
whom De Vere is a sealed book. 

" * Greece never produced anything so exqui- 
site,' wrote Landor beneath the following song : 

" ' Give me back my heart, fair child ; 

To you as yet 'twere worth but little 
Half beguiler, half beguiled. 

Be you warned, your own is brittle : 
I know it by your redd'ning cheeks, 
I know it by those two black streaks 
Arching up your pearly brows 

In a momentary laughter. 
Stretched in long and dark repose 

With a sigh the moment after. 

" * " Hid it ! dropt it on the moors ! 

Lost it, and you cannot find it " — 
My own heart I want, not yours : 

You have bound and must unbind it. 
Set it free then from your net. 
We will love, sweet — but not yet ! 
Fling it from you ; — we are strong ; 

Love is trouble, love is folly ; 
Love, that makes an old heart young. 

Makes a young heart melancholy.' 
270 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

"And for this Landor claimed that it was 
* finer than the best in Horace ' : — 

« ' Slanting both hands against her forehead. 
On me she levelled her bright eyes. 
My whole heart brightened as the sea 
When midnight clouds part suddenly : — 
Through all my spirit went the lustre. 
Like starhght poured through purple skies. 

« ' And then she sang a loud, sweet music ; 
Yet louder as aloft it clomb : 
Soft when her curving lips it left ; 
Then rising till the heavens were cleft. 
As though each strain, on high expanding. 
Were echoed in a silver dome. 

" ' But hark! she sings " she does not love me " : 
She loves to say she ne'er can love. 
To me her beauty she denies, — 
Bending the while on me those eyes. 
Whose beams might charm the mountain leopard. 
Or lure Jove's herald from above ! ' 

" Below the following exquisite bit of melody 
is written, * Never was any sonnet so beautiful.' 

« * She whom this heart must ever hold most dear 
(This heart in happy bondage held so long) 
Began to sing : At first a gentle fear 
Rosied her countenance, for she is young. 
And he who loves her most of all was near ; 
But when at last her voice grew full and strong, 
271 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

! from their ambush sweet, how rich and clear 
The notes were showered abroad, a raptm-ous throng ! 
Her httle hands were sometimes flung apart. 

And sometimes palm to palm together prest. 
While wavelike blushes rising from her breast 
Kept time with that aerial melody. 
As music to the sight ! — I standing nigh 
Received the falling fountain in my heart.' 

" ' What sonnet of Petrarca equals this ? ' he 
says of the following : — 

*' ' Happy are they who kiss thee, morn and even. 
Parting the hair upon thy forehead white : 
For them the sky is bluer and more bright. 
And purer their thanksgivings rise to Heaven. 
Happy are they to whom thy songs are given ; 
Happy are they on whom thy hands alight : 
And happiest they for whom thy prayers at night 
In tender piety so oft have striven. 
Away with vain regrets and selfish sighs — 
Even I, dear friend, ara lonely, not unblest : 
Permitted sometimes on that form to gaze. 
Or feel the light of those consoling eyes : 
If but a moment on my cheek it stays, 

1 know that gentle beam from all the rest ! ' 

" * Like Shakespeare's, but better,' is this alle- 
gory:— 

" ' You say that you have given your love to me. 
Ah, give it not, but lend it me ; and say 
That you will ofttimes ask me to repay. 
But never to restore it : so shall we, 

272 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

Retaining., still bestow perpetually : 
So shall I ask thee for it every day. 
Securely as for daily bread we pray ; 
So all of favor, naught of right shall be. 
The joy which now is mine shall leave me never. 
Indeed, I have deserved it not ; and yet 
• No painful blush is mine, — so soon my face 
Blushing is hid in that beloved embrace. 
Myself I would condemn not, but forget ; 
Remembering thee alone, and thee forever ! ' 

" * Worthy of Raleigh and Hke him,' is Landor's 
preface to the following sonnet : — 

" ' Flowers I would bring, if flowers could make thee fairer, 
And music, if the Muse were dear to thee, 
(For loving these would make thee love the bearer :) 
But sweetest songs forget their melody. 
And loveliest flowers would but conceal the wearer ; 
A rose I marked, and might have plucked ; but she 
Blushed as she bent, imploring me to spare her, 
Nor spoil her beauty by such rivalry. 
Alas ! and with what gifts shall I pursue thee. 
What offerings bring, what treasures lay before thee. 
When earth with all her floral train doth woo thee. 
And all old poets and old songs adore thee. 
And love to thee is naught, from passionate mood 
Secured by joy's complacent plenitude ! ' 

" Occasionally Landor indulges in a little 
humorous indignation, particularly in his re- 

18 273 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

marks on the poem of which Coleridge is the 
hero. De Vere's lines end thus : — 

" ' Soft be the sound ordained thy sleep to break ! 
When thou art waking, wake me, for thy Master's sake.' 

"* And let me nap on,' wrote the august critic, 
who had no desire to meet Coleridge, even as a 
celestial being. 

" Now and then there is a dash of the pencil 
across some final verse, with the remark, ' Better 
without these.' Twice or thrice Landor finds 
fault with a word. 

"The following note," continues Miss Field, 
" is worthy to be transcribed, showing as it does 
the generosity of his nature at a time when 
he had nothing to give away but ideas. Landor 
wrote : — 

" My dear Friend, — Will you think it 
worth your while to transcribe the enclosed ? 
These pages I have corrected and enlarged. 
Some of them you have never seen. They have 
occupied more of my time and trouble, and are 
now more complete, than anything you have 
favored me by reading. I hope you will be 
pleased. I care less about others. ... I hope 
you will get something for these articles, and 

274 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

keep it. 1 am richer by several crowns than 
you suspect, and I must scramble to the king- 
dom of Heaven, to which a full pocket, we learn, 
is an impediment. 

Ever truly yours, 

W. S. L. 

" The manuscripts contained the two conver- 
sations between Homer and Laertes which two 
years ago were published in the * Heroic Idyls.' 
I did not put them to the use desired by their 
author. Though my copies differ somewhat 
from the printed ones, it is natural to conclude 
that Landor most approved of what was last 
submitted to his inspection, and would not de- 
sire to be seen in any other guise. The publicity 
of a note prefixed to one of these conversations, 
however is warranted. 

" It will be thought audacious, and most so by 
those who know the least of Homer, to represent 
him as talking so famiUarly. He must often 
have done it, as Milton and Shakespeare did. 
There is homely talk in the 'Odyssey.' 

" Fashion turns round like Fortune. Twenty 
years hence, perhaps, this conversation of Homer 
and Laertes, in which for the first time Greek 

275 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

domestic manners have been represented by any 
modern poet, may be recognized and approved." 

Miss Field again writes : — 

"Popular as is the belief that Landor's gifts 
were the offspring of profound study, he himself 
says : * Only four years of my life were given up 
much to study ; and I regret that I spent so 
many so ill. Even these debarred me from no 
pleasure ; for I seldom read or wrote within 
doors, excepting a few hours at night. The 
learning of those who are called the learned is 
learning at second hand ; the primary and most 
important must be acquired by reading in our 
own bosoms ; the rest by a deep insight into 
other men's. What is written is mostly an im- 
perfect and unfaithful copy.' This confession 
emanates from one who is claimed as a university 
rather than a universal man. Landor remained 
but two years at Oxford, and, though deeply in- 
terested in the classics, never contended for a 
Latin prize. Speaking of this one day, he said : 
' I once wrote some Latin verses for a fellow ot 
my college who, being in great trouble, came to 
me for aid. What was hard work to him was 

276 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

pastime to me, and it ended in my composing 
the entire poem. At the time the fellow was 
very grateful, but it happened that these verses 
excited attention and were much eulogized. The 
supposed author accepted the praise as due to 
himself This of course I expected, as he knew 
full well I would never betray him ; but the 
amusing part of the matter was that the fellow 
never afterwards spoke to me, never came near 
me, — in fact, treated me as though I had done 
him a grievous wrong. It was of no consequence 
to me that he strutted about in my feathers. If 
they became him, he was welcome to them, — 
but of such is the kingdom of cowards.'" 

"Poetry," writes Landor, "was always my 
amusement, prose my study and business." In 
his twentieth year he lived in the woods, " did 
not exchange twelve sentences Avith men," and 
wrote " Gebir," his most elaborate and ambitious 
poem, which Southey took as a model in blank 
verse. 

Among Landor's correspondence in these clos- 
ing years the following letters that passed between 
Kossuth and himself tell their own story of 
Landor's sympathy with the cause of liberty. 

277 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

The letter from Kossuth to Landor is as 
follows : — 

8, South Bank Regents Park, 
London, March 24, 1856. 

My venerable Friend, — Though I very 
gratefully appreciate the generosity of your in- 
tentions, still I must confess, that few things have 
ever affected me more painfully than to see from 
the Times of to-day, my private circumstances, 
the sacred domain of my life — thrust as an object 
of commiseration upon public discussion, a miser- 
able subject of public sneers. 

My head turns giddy at the very thought, and 
my resignation is scarcely able to overcome the 
shame, I don't know how 1 shall muster sufficient 
resolution to appear in public ever hereafter ; 
and I fear with all your good intentions, you 
shall have become the involuntary instrument for 
driving me out of EnglancJ, before my time: I 
really scarcely can imagine what else I have to 
do, unless you devise some means for healing the 
wound. 

I am poor, very poor ; but there was, I dare say, 
something honorable in that poverty, something 
sacred I would say. But seeing it made the 
object of a public appeal for commiseration, I 

278 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

feel as if everything that was sacred to my 
position had undergone a profanation. 

I repeat that I respect and appreciate the no- 
bihty of your impulses, but I regret that such a 
step should have been taken without my having 
an idea of its possibility. 

I will say no more, but leave it with your 
prudence and discretion to mitigate the blow your 
kindness has inflicted on me. And remain with 
^wonted esteem, only mingled with grief, 

Yours very truly, 

Kossuth. 

To Walter Savage Landor. 

To which Landor replied : — 

" It is impossible for me to rest until I have 
attempted to remove the vexation I have caused 
to the man I most venerate of any upon earth. 

" My noble Kossuth ! ' The sacred domain of 
your life' is far more extensive than your 
measurement. Neither your house nor your 
banker's are its confines. Do not imagine that 
the World is ignorant of your circumstances : it 
would be a crime to be indifferent to them. 
The Editor of the * Atlas ' in announcing that he 
had ^secured' your co-operation, published a 

279 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

manifesto. I know nothing of this editor ; but, 
so long as you contributed to the paper, I was 
your humble subsidiary. 

'" Consider how many men, wealthier than you 
and me, have accepted the offers of those who 
came forward to indemnify the persecuted for the 
demolition of their property. Ask yourself if 
Demosthenes or JMilton, the two most illustrious 
defenders of liberty, by speech and pen, would 
have thrust aside the tribute which is due to such 
men alone. AVould you dash out the signature of 
one who declares you his trustee for a legacy to 
your children? No, you would not. Neither 
will you reject the proofs of high esteem, however 
manifested, which England, however debased, is 
anxious to give. 

" Believe me ever sincerely 
and affectionately yours, 

"W. S. Landor." 

The originals of these two letters (which Miss 
Kate Field had preserved among her JMSS.) were 
given by her biographer^ to the Boston Public 
Library, together with many autograph letters 
wiitten to JNIiss Field herself by many of the 

1 Kate Field : A Record. 
280 




VIKVV rHOM 'IIIK GrtOIJMJS OK VI/,I,A LANDOH. 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

famous people of the nineteenth century. Her 
own reminiscences of Landor, from which the 
foregoing transcripts have been freely drawn, were 
placed by her publishers at the disposal of the 
writer of this volume. 

It was in the summer of 1859 that, owing to 
domestic difficulties, Mr. Landor left his beautiful 
villa on the hillside near Fiesole and came under 
the immediate care of Mr. Browning, who ar- 
ranged for the aged poet to go for a time to a 
little apartment in Siena ; but the Storys, who 
were then in viUe^giatura in the quaint old 
mediaeval city, invited him to their villa. " He 
made us a long visit," wrote Mrs. Story, " and 
was an honored and cherished guest. During 
the time he was with us his courtesy and high 
breeding never failed him ; he was touchingly 
pleased and happy with our life, and so delightful 
and amusing that we ourselves grieved when it 
came to an end." 

Later, the Brownings took the Villa Alberti, 
a little distance from the Storys, and a villina 
close to the Brownings was engaged for Mr. Lan- 
dor, who would ho. seen astir in the early morn- 
ings writing I^atin verses under the cypress trees. 
Mrs. Story's letters mention how frequently the 

281 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

aged poet came to them, and she says : " His 
mention of Rose Aylmer — and he often men- 
tioned her — always brought the tears to his 
eyes if not to ours ; for there with her he had 
evidently buried his heart." And Mrs. Brown- 
ing wrote of Landor to a friend, saying : — 

" He has excellent, generous, affectionate im- 
pulses, but the impulses of the tiger every now 
and then. Nothing coheres in him, either in his 
opinions, or, I fear, his affections. It is n't age — 
he is precisely the man of his youth, I must 
believe. Still, his genius gives him the right to 
gratitude of all artists at least, and I must say 
that my Robert has generously paid the debt. 
Robert always said that he owed more as a 
writer to Landor than to any contemporary. At 
present Landor is very fond of him, but I am 
quite prepared for his turning against us as he 
has turned against Forster, who has been so 
devoted for years and years. Only one isn't 
kind for what one gets by it, or there would n't 
be much kindness in this world." 

Landor's friendships, however, were for the 
most part very sincere and strong. The strangely 
trying domestic infelicities that he suffered evi- 

282 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

dently left their trace on him, but in the main his 
noble nature always prevailed. He was a keen 
observer of character. Being asked at one time if 
he had ever seen Daniel Webster, Landor re- 
plied, " I once met Mr. Webster at a dinner- 
party. We sat next each other, and had a most 
agreeable conversation. Finally Mr. Webster 
asked me if 1 would have taken him for an 
American, and I answered, ' Yes, for the best of 
Americans I ' " 

For Southey his friendship was abounding, as 
it was for Lamb and Coleridge ; and he gave to 
Keats an ardent appreciation. The remarkable 
quotation whose first Hne runs : — 

" I strove with none ; for none was worth my strife." 

was written on the evening of his seventy-fifth 
birthday after the departure of his friends, Dickens 
and .lohn Forster, who had passed the anniversary 
with him. He sent the stanza to Mr. Forster 
with a little note that ran : — 

" My thanks were not spoken to you and 
Dickens for your journey of two hundred miles 
upon my birthday. Here they are, — not visible 
on the surface of the paper, nor on any surface 
whatever, but in the heart that is dictating this 

283 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

letter. On the night you left me I wrote the 
following Dying Speech of an old Philoso- 
pher." 

Then followed the stanza which is given in 
full at the opening of this chapter. 

Curiously, it is said that although Shelley and 
Landor both lived in Paris at the same time, and 
each highly appreciated the other's poetry, they 
never met. Landor cared for Wordsworth, but 
said that he found in him " a sad deficiency of vital 
heat." His closest affinities were with the Latin 
poets, and of the modern, Shakespeare and Milton 
were his best-loved. Browning he cared for in- 
tensely, and Mrs. Browning's friendship cheered 
the lonely old man who had outlived all his early 
contemporaries, almost to the last. Browning's 
poetry puzzled him, although he was one of the 
earliest to recognize the genius of the author of 
" Pauline," while of Browning himself Landor 
wrote : — 

" Since Chaucer was alive and hale. 
No man hath walked along our roads with step, 
So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue 
So varied in discourse." 

" I have always deeply regretted that I never 
met Shelley," said Landor to Miss Field. *' It 

284, 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

was my own fault, for I was in Pisa the winter 
he resided there, and was told that Shelley de- 
sired to make my acquaintance. But I refused 
to make his, as at that time, I believed the dis- 
graceful story related of him in connection with 
his first wife. Years after, when I called upon 
the second Mrs. Shelley, who, then a widow, 
was living out of London, I related to her what I 
had heard. She assured me that it was a most 
infamous falsehood, one of the many that had 
been maliciously circulated about her husband. 
I expressed my sorrow at not having been un- 
deceived earlier, and assured her I never could 
forgive myself for crediting a slander that had 
prevented me from knowing Shelley. I was 
much pleased with Mrs. Shelley." 

Landor's companionship was always inspiring 
to his friends. His profound and vast learning, 
his varied information, his wide acquaintance 
with celebrated persons, his ready wit and rep- 
artee rendered his conversation so rich and enter- 
taining as to be an exceptional privilege. 

In " Pericles and Aspasia," Cleone has written 
with Landor's pen, that " study is the bane of 
boyhood, the aliment of youth, the indulgence 
of manhood, and the restorative of old age." Of 

285 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

this theory there could be no better example 
than Landor himself. That life which outlasted 
all the friends of its zenith was made rich by a 
constant devotion to the greatest works of the 
greatest men. Milton and Shakespeare were his 
constant companions, by night as well as by day. 
*' I never tire of them," he would say ; " they are 
always a revelation. And how grand is Milton's 
prose ! quite as fine as his poetry I " He was 
said to be very fond of repeating the following 
celebrated Unes that have the ring of truth ; 

'< But when God commands to take the trumpet 
And blow a dolorous or thrilling blast. 
It rests not with man's will what he shall say 
Or what he shall conceal." 

"Was anything more harmonious ever writ- 
ten?" Landor would ask. "But Milton, you 
know, is old-fashioned. I believe I am old-fash- 
ioned. However, it is rather an honor to be 
classed thus, if one may keep such distinguished 
company." How devoted a student of Milton 
Landor was is evidenced in his delightful critical 
conversation between Southey and himself, 
wherein he declared, " Such stupendous genius, 
so much fancy, so much eloquence, so much 

286 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

vigor of intellect never were united as in Paradise 
Lost." 

In 1861 Landor sent to Kate Field the last 
lines he ever wrote, addressed to the English 
Homer, entitled 

"MILTON IN ITALY. 

** O Milton ! couldst thou rise again, and see 
The land thou lovedst in an earlier day ! 
See, springing from her tomb, fair Italy 
(Fairer than ever) cast her shroud away, — 
That tightly-fastened triply-folded shroud ! 
Around her, shameful sight ! crowd upon crowd. 
Nations in agony lie speechless down. 
And Europe trembles at a despot's frown." 

"We took many drives with Landor during 
the spring and summer of 1861, and made very 
delightful jaunts into the country," wrote Miss 
Field of one of his latest summers. 

" Not forgetful in the least of things, the old 
man, in spite of his age, would always insist upon 
taking the front seat, and was more active than 
many a younger man in assisting us in and out 
of the carriage. ' You are the most genuinely 
polite man I know,' once wrote Lady Blessington 
to him. The verdict of 1840 could not have 

287 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

been overruled twenty-one years later. Once 
we drove up to * aerial Fiesole,' and never can I 
forget Landor's manner while in the neighbor- 
hood of his former home. It had been proposed 
that we should turn back when only half-way up 
the hill. ' Ah, go a little farther,' Landor said 
nervously ; ' I should like to see my villa.' Of 
course his wish was our pleasure, and so the 
drive was continued. Landor sat immovable, 
with head turned in the direction of the Villa 
Gherardesca. At first sight of it he gave a sud- 
den start, and genuine tears filled his eyes and 
coursed down his cheeks. ' There 's where T lived,' 
he said, breaking a long silence and pointing to 
his old estate. Still we mounted the hill, and 
when at a turn in the road the villa stood out 
before us clearly and distinctly, Landor said, 
' Let us give the horses a rest here ! ' We 
stopped, and for several minutes Landor's gaze was 
fixed upon the villa. * There now, we can return 
to Florence, if you like,' he murmured, finally, 
with a deep sigh. * 1 have seen it probably for the 
last time.' Hardly a word was spoken during 
the drive home. Landor seemed to be absent- 
minded. A sadder, more pathetic picture than 
he made during this memorable drive is rarely 

288 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

seen. * With me life has been a failure,' was the 
expression of that wretched, worn face. Those 
who believe Landor to have been devoid of 
heart should have seen him then." 

To the visitor in Florence, Villa Landor is still 
one of the objects of pilgrimage, and to its history 
since the death of the poet has been added a 
chapter of rich memories in its having been the 
home, for more than twenty years, of Prof. Dan- 
iel Willard Fiske, formerly of Cornell University. 
Professor Fiske restored the special features of 
the villa as it had been during Landor's day ; but 
while preserving its historic aspect. Professor 
Fiske fitted up the villa with every modern 
convenience, and furnished it with the most ex- 
quisite taste. It is a spacious dwelling, with lofty 
salons on three floors. Rich rugs, woven ex- 
pressly to the order of Professor Fiske in Damas- 
cus ; rare carvings, inlaid mosaics, decorated 
ceilings, and every conceivable luxury of a beauti- 
ful home filled the rooms pervaded by the genius 
of Walter Savage Landor. For it was here that 
he had written those brilliant " Imaginary Con- 
versations " and nearly aU his poems. The dining- 
room, which was the scene of the famous fray 

19 289 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

which terminated in Mr. Landor's throwing his 
cook out of the window, still has that violet bed 
beneath its windows, which the irascible poet 
feared he had injured, oblivious to any danger of 
a broken neck to his* victim. Above the dining- 
room is the room that Landor used for his study 
— the windows framing another of those beauti- 
ful views that are enjoyed in every direction from 
Florence. 

In one of the salons Professor Fiske had the 
portrait medallion head of Landor carved in stone 
over one of the mantelpieces. The choice books, 
many rare editions of beautiful folios, add distinc- 
tion to the library. Every room held its enchant- 
ment in artistic interest. Professor Fiske was very 
hospitable, seldom being without guests under 
his roof. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Bailey Aldrich 
passed a part of one winter with him. Professor 
and Mrs. Goldwin Smith were his guests for some 
weeks, and many foreigners of distinction visited 
him. He was a reticent man, with a settled sad- 
ness of manner ; but when he was stimulated to 
his best by the congenial atmosphere of some 
group of near friends, his conversation was de- 
lightful. 

By a curious coincidence. Professor Fiske died 
290 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

on the fortieth anniversary of Landor's death. To 
Uterature, Professor Fiske has rendered a great 
service in the collection of a specialist library of 
Dante, of Petrarcha, and of Icelandic literature. 
The Dante collection he had already presented 
to Cornell University ; that of the other two were 
placed in Florence, forming one of the most ideal 
of libraries, and one which, by the kind courtesy 
of Professor Fiske, it was the privilege of some 
tourists to visit. Professor Fiske domiciled this 
rare and exquisite collection in a noble apartment 
in a palace on the Via Lungo il Mugnone, facing 
the purple mountains. The spacious apartment 
was luxuriously fitted up with rich rugs, a great U- 
brary-table, with every convenience and ornament; 
the walls of the room were lined with the books, 
running up to the Pompeian red frieze. Professor 
Fiske had two secretaries constantly in attendance 
— one an Italian for the Petrarcha collection, and 
a Dane (or Norwegian) for the Icelandic. It is a 
very rare and a very notable achievement to have 
brought together such a threefold collection as 
that of Professor Fiske, — an achievement that 
required not only the finest taste and the most 
liberal scholarship, but also the wealth to make 
possible such fulfilment of an ideal. Many who 

291 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

might have the scholarly knowledge and the 
taste would be unable to command the required 
wealth ; others, more numerous, who might easily 
command the wealth, would be far from possess- 
ing the requisite knowledge and the literary taste 
inspiring such a work. It is a monument to ele- 
gant scholarship. The present collection is an 
evolutionary result, so to speak, of an idea that 
occurred to Professor Fiske in the spring of 1892, 
when, as he was searching for Petrarcha books in 
an old Italian shop, he chanced upon a copy of 
the " Divina Commedia " dated 1536, which he 
immediately purchased. For three years the pro- 
fessor continued his quest and his purchases. 

" I not only wandered through the bookshops 
of all the larger and many of the smaller cities of 
Italy," he said, " but visited, more than once, the 
principal book marts of Great Britain, France, 
Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, 
my journeys extending northward to Edinburgh 
and Stockholm. When not travelling or buying 
I was conning catalogues or corresponding with 
booksellers, publishers, and librarians in all the 
lands lying between Brazil and India, between 
Lisbon and St. Petersburg." 

Curiously, the city that yielded him the larg- 
292 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

est and most important results in Dantean litera- 
ture was London, where Professor Fiske found 
a dealer who had accumulated a private Dante 
library. After London he found the most pro- 
ductive markets in Florence, Rome, Milan, 
Turin, and Paris. The scholarly quest seems to 
have abounded in pleasant incidents. " When I 
chanced in Perugia to inquire at a street book 
stall in relation to Dante," said Professor Fiske, 
* an elderly bystander — whom I afterward grew 
to know as a delightful scholar and gentleman — 
turned to me, saying that he himself owned a 
small Dante collection, which he should take 
pleasure in showing me. Repairing with him to 
his home, I was taken to a little room, wherein 
were two or three presses filled with Dante lit- 
erature, including nearly every opuscule concern- 
ing the poet which had been issued in Umbria 
or thereabouts, of most of which the various 
local librarians I had previously consulted had 
avowed their complete ignorance. Their pos- 
sessor insisted upon my taking them all without 
payment, sajdng that his own little collection 
was of slight importance compared to the large 
one I was endeavoring to bring together. It 
was only on my positively declining to accept 

293 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

his too liberal offer that he consented to let me 
send him in exchange other works on the same 
theme which he lacked." 

This magnificent gift to Cornell must be a 
feature that will always attract students of Itahan 
literature and poetry to that university, and en- 
able it to hold a kind of perpetual festival of 
scholarship. Of the supreme power of Dante, 
Lowell well said : " Almost all the other poets 
have their seasons, but Dante penetrates to 
the moral core of those who once fairly come 
within his sphere, and possesses them wholly. 
His readers turn students, his students zealots, 
and what was a taste becomes a religion. 
If Shakespeare be the most comprehensive 
intellect, so Dante is the highest spiritual 
nature that has expressed itself in rhythmical 
form." 

The atmosphere of scholarly culture and lofty 
aspiration with which Landor invested his home 
was revived by Daniel Willard Fiske during his 
tenure of the villa. Again was it pervaded by 
intellectual activities of a high order and by the 
social charm of lovely friends who lingered there. 
With this wealth of association and its romantic 
environment, Villa Landor will remain one of 

294 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

the monuments of Florence, invested with a rich 
and varied interest. 

Landor remained for some weeks as the guest 
of the Storys, and later in his little casa in Siena, 
until the late autumn days of 1859 called the 
Brownings back to Florence, and the Storys to 
Rome. He loved the strange mediaeval town ; 
for in Siena one feels that life of the fourteenth 
century when this city was the successful rival 
of Florence. It is an example of arrested devel- 
opment. Florence has progressed. Siena has 
stood still. Its narrow, dark streets, which seem 
like wells at the foot of the lofty stone buildings, 
are still traversed by white oxen and an occa- 
sional donkey cart. The streets are so steep 
that on most of them no horse could keep his 
footing on their stony pavement, and some of 
them, indeed, are more hke stone staircases than 
streets. 

Siena is a Tuscan town, about fifty miles from 
Florence, but the journey requires some five 
hours, as the Italian trains offer the maximum of 
delay and discomfort to the minimum of dis- 
tance. It is a walled city with nine gates, and 
the city is absolutely limited to the space within 
the walls. It has never diffused itself into sub- 

295 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

urbs, and outside the wall there is the unbroken 
stretch of country. It is located on the summits 
of three hills, and all the country roads lead up 
to the nine gates. The view from the citadel is 
unique in all Europe. One looks down on the 
surrounding country, while in the distance from 
eight to ten lines of mountain ranges are seen, 
one after another, each undulating horizon line 
growing fainter and fainter as it recedes. The 
ground is of a brown tint, from which the name 
of Siena brown. A soft haze of purples and the 
most delicate suggestion of rose and mauve form 
a transparent veil over the landscape, while cas- 
tles, towers, convents, and campaniles diversify 
all the hillsides in this great sweep of country. 

The civilization about Siena is very old, and 
the people are proud of their university (whose 
specialties are law and medicine) of the purity of 
Italian as spoken by Sienese scholars, and of the 
galleries where Sienese art can be studied chro- 
nologically and in its completeness. 

The home and haunts of Catharine of Siena 
form an object of pilgrimage. Catharine was 
born in 1347 and died in 1380. Her father was 
a dyer, and their home and the shop were in 
the Contrado d'Oca, a depressed district of poor 

296 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

people. The house and shop stand to-day as 
they stood during her hfetime, and over the 
door is written in gold letters, " Sposae Christi 
Catharine Domus." On the adjoining hill stands 
the vast church of St. Dominico, in the chapel of 
which Catharine prayed and saw visions. 

" Catharine of Siena was to the fourteenth 
century what St. Bernard was to the twelfth, — 
the light and support of the Church. At the 
moment when the bark of St. Peter was most 
strongly agitated by the tempest, God gave it 
for pilot a poor young girl who was concealing 
herself in the little shop of a dyer. Catharine 
travelled to France to lead the Pontiff Greg- 
ory XI. away from the delights of his native 
land ; she brought back the Popes to Rome, the 
real centre of Christianity. She^ addressed her- 
self to cardinals, princes, and kings. . . . By the 
power of her eloquence and the ardor of her 
piety she succeeded as a mediator between Flor- 
ence and her native city, and between Florence 
and the Pope. . . . Like St. Francis, St. Ber- 
nard, and Savonarola, Catharine became the fear- 
less monitor of the Church and a prophet to it 
of warning and rebuke." 

297 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

The impressiveness of all this scenery of her 
life cannot be imagined until one is in the midst 
of it. The house where she lived has been be- 
reft of much of its interest by the converting of 
all its rooms into chapels which are not distinc- 
tive ; but there is still shown the little cell where 
she slept, — a tiny recess in the wall with a 
stone floor on which she lay, refusing comfort or 
warmth, and it is related that she always con- 
tinued in prayer until the matin sounded from 
St. Dominico, in order that the district in which 
she lived might never be without its devotions 
ascending to God. There are shown certain 
relics, — the lantern she carried when on her 
ministering errands at night about Siena; the 
cap she wore, and her prayer, printed on slips 
that the tourist may buy. 

The Church of St. Dominico is one of the 
most curious of the old mediasval structures. It 
dates back to the twelfth century, and has appa- 
rently been very Httle altered since that time. 
It is perfectly bare in its interior, nor are the 
chapels particularly rich, although there are a 
few paintings and pieces of sculptures that are 
worth seeing. The little chapel where Catharine 
held her protracted vigils is kept in semi-privacy, 

298 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

and one enters by special permission only. On 
the stone floor there is a red heart inlaid with the 
inscription that on that spot Christ changed the 
heart of Catharine. Over the door of this chapel 
is inscribed: 

" Haec tenet ara caput Catharinae ; corda respiris ? 
Haec inno Christus pectore clausa tenet." 

Practically the church is unchanged, and one 
wanders through its vast and rather gloomy in- 
terior ; lingers in the chapel where Catharine saw 
visions and dreamed dreams, and where her head 
is preserved in a silver reliquary, while her body 
is entombed in Rome. It is related that when 
she was six years old she saw a vision of Jesus 
in the golden clouds of the evening, and that He 
smiled upon her, extending his hands in blessing. 
At another time in her childhood she longed to 
go to the desert, and she actually left the city 
and found a grotto in a hill, where, she said, God 
came to her and told her she had another work 
in life to do than that of seeking solitude, and 
that she must return to her father's house. At 
another time she said that the Lord thus coun- 
selled her when she had desired to seclude herself 
from men : — 

299 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

" Be calm, my child ; thou must accomphsh 
all justice that my grace may become fruitful 
in thee and in others. I desire not that thou 
shouldst be separated from me ; on the contrary, 
I desire that thou shouldst become more closely 
united to me by charity toward thy fellow- 
creatures. Thou knowest that love has two 
commandments, to love me and to love thy 
neighbor. I desire that thou shouldst walk, not 
on one, but on two feet, and fly to heaven on 
two wings." 

This counsel is well worth remembering in its 
breadth of application to life. 

Siena is the one place in which to study the 
great frescoes of Sodoma. In the Palazza Pub- 
lico one finds his figures of St. Ansano and St. 
Vittorio, San Bernardo, the Holy Family, and 
other of his most important works. 

Once a year, on St. Catharine's day, which all 
Siena regards as a " festa," celebrating with pro- 
cessions and banners and high mass, the head of 
Catharine is exhibited to the people. The story 
of Catharine's miraculous life is too authentic 
in history to admit of doubt. John Addington 
Symonds says of her : " She walked surrounded 

soo 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

by a spiritual world, environed by angels. Her 
habits were calculated to foster this disposition. 
She took little sleep ; she ate nothing but vege- 
tables and the sacred wafer of the host, entirely 
abjuring wine and meat. This diet depressed 
the physical forces and exalted the nervous sys- 
tem. Thoughts became things, and ideas were 
projected from her vivid fancy upon the empty 
air about her." 

In the light of modern psychical research, how- 
ever, it is certainly conceivable that this deple- 
tion of the physical and exaltation of the nervous 
system may, instead of producing hallucination, 
have produced receptivity instead ; that it may 
have permitted her to see what truly existed, 
but that to which ordinary life is blind. The 
world of the unseen is as real — is far more real, 
indeed — than the world of the seen. It is a 
realm where ever5i:hing is in a state of higher 
vibration, and is thus only visible to the most 
sensitive and exalted conditions. All these won- 
derful and mystic legends and history regarding 
Catharine of Siena seem not unlinked with the 
facts and results that invest psychic research in 
the present day. 

One of the most interesting places in Italy 

301 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

is this Tuscan town of Siena. The interior of 
the cathedral is all in black and white, with 
curious effects of interarching and some of the 
finest wood carvings in the entire world. 

Siena is a living page out of history, and, after 
Rome, Venice, and Florence, there is no ques- 
tion but that Siena is the most important city in 
Italy for the visitor to study. 

The journey between Florence and Siena has 
perpetual change and charm. The hills are 
crowned with castles, towers, convents, and 
campaniles which silhouette themselves against 
the sky, and the wooded valleys are full of wind- 
ing roadways and mysterious lights ; the horizon 
shows sometimes eight or ten undulating lines 
of mountain ranges ending in a line of snow, 
with the most delicate play of colors in 
the foreground, — purple and rose and pale 
greens, — while the old gray stone houses, 
often fortified just as they stood six hundred 
years ago, are surrounded by the silvery hue of 
the gray-green olive orchards, and defined by 
the tall, solemn cypress trees that stand like 
grim sentinels. 

To what degree Siena impressed Landor is not 
recorded in any of his writings. Doubtless he 

302 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

had before visited the old city ; but at this time 
— in his extreme old age — it was his friends 
and his literary work that engaged his interest. 
The composition of a Latin verse enlisted his 
attention far more deeply than art, myth, or 
Jegend. The scenery of memory absorbed him 
rather than that of the outer world. 

On their return to Florence, Mr. Browning es- 
tablished Landor in a Httle casa (number 2671) 
in the Via Nunziatina near the Church of the 
Carmine and also near Casa Guidi. The httle 
street, whose name has now been changed, is in 
one of the most picturesque parts of Florence, 
and its high antique buildings hold always a 
nameless charm for the visitor. Mrs. Browning's 
own maid, Wilson, who had married an Italian, 
was placed in charge of Landor's household, and 
with his books about him, reading Odyssey in 
the original and happy in acquiring new pictures 
by Domenichino and Poussin, — problematic as 
was their genuineness, — Landor passed his time 
with his books and his thoughts. " Nothing," 
he wrote in a letter to John Forster about this 
time, " can exceed Mr. Browning's continued 
kindness. Life would be almost worth keeping 
for that recollection alone." 

303 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

And Browning wrote of Landor to Mr. 
Forster : — 

"At present Landor's conduct is faultless. 
His wants are so moderate, his evenness of tem- 
per so remarkable, his gentleness and readiness 
to be advised so exemplary, that it all seems too 
good ; as if some rock must lurk under such 
smooth water. His thankfulness for the least 
attention, and anxiety to return it, are almost 
affecting under all circumstances. He leads a 
life of the utmost simplicity." 

The Brownings had arranged to pass this win- 
ter of 1859-60, in Rome, and Mr. Browning spoke 
to friends of his regret in this absence from the 
wonderful old man, whose gentle courtesy and 
benignancy increased during their closer inter- 
course. They often walked for two hours to- 
gether in rambles about Florence. " He writes 
Latin verses," says Browning of him ; " few 
English, but a few ; and just before we left Siena 
an imaginary conversation suggested by some- 
thing one of us had said about the possible re- 
appearance of the body after death. He looks 
better than ever by the amplitude of a capital 
beard, most becoming, we all judge it." " If 

304 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

you could only see how well he looks in his 
curly white beard ! " Mrs. Browning wrote in a 
letter to England. 

Mr. Burne-Jones and Mr. Val Prinsep were 
in Rome also that season carrying a letter of 
introduction to the Brownings from Rossetti, 
and the Brownings also met and knew Cardinal 
(then Dr. ) Manning, in Rome that winter. " We 
left Mr. Landor in great comfort," Mrs. Brown- 
ing writes from Rome to a friend. " I went to see 
his apartment before it was furnished. Rooms 
small, but with a lookout into a little garden ; 
quiet and cheerful. . . . His genius gives him 
the right of gratitude on the part of all artists 
at least." 

The rooms all opened into each other, and in 
the sitting-room Landor was usually to be found, 
" sitting in a large arm-chair, surrounded by paint- 
ings, which he declared he could not live without 
(all of them very bad for the most part, except- 
ing one genuine small Salvator), his hair snowy 
white and his beard of patriarchal proportions, 
his gray eyes still keen and clear, his grand head 
not unlike Michael Angelo's Moses, and at his 
feet a pretty little Pomeranian dog called Gaillo, 
the gift of Mr. WiUiam Story." 

20 305 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

In the following June the Brownings returned 
from Rome, and of Landor Mr. Browning says : 

" I find him very well, satisfied on the whole, 
busy with verse-making, and particularly de- 
lighted at the acquisition of three execrable daubs 
by Domenichino and Gaspar Poussin, most be- 
nevolently battered by time. He has a beautiful 
beard, foam-white and soft. He reads the 
Odyssey in the original with extraordinary ease. 
When he alludes to that other matter, it is clear 
that he is, from whatever pecuHarity, quite imper- 
vious to reasoning or common-sense. He cannot 
in the least understand that he is at all wrong, or 
injudicious, or unwary, or unfortunate in anything, 
but in the being prevented by you from doubling 
and quadrupling the offence. He spent the even- 
ing here the night before last. Whatever he may 
profess, the thing he really loves is a pretty girl 
to talk nonsense with ; and he finds comfort 
in American visitors, who hold him in proper 
respect." 

The twihght deepened. His faithful friend, 
Mr. Kirkup continued to visit him. Algernon 
Charles Swinburne came to Florence to pay his 
tribute to England's oldest living poet, and later 

306 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

he wrote the beautiful lyric which forever links 
the names of those who were at the time, — 

" The youngest and the oldest singer 
That England bore." 

Mrs. Browning died in June of 1861, leaving 
as the last thing she had touched, a half finished 
letter to Mme. Mario " full of noble words about 
Italy." The death of Cavour had deeply affected 
her. Mr. Browning left Italy, never to return. 
"You cannot imagine how I miss him,"-^ wrote 
Mr. Story to Prof. Charles EHot Norton. " For 
three years now we have always been together ; 
all the long summer evenings of these last sum- 
mers in Siena we sat on our terrace night after 
night, talking, or we played and sang together. 
All the last winters he worked with me daily for 
three hours in my studio ; and we met, either at 
my house, or his, or at that of some friend, nearly 
every evening. There is no one to supply his 
place. . . . No one with whom I can sympathize 
on all points as with him, no one with whom I can 
walk any of the higher ranges of art and philoso- 
phy. Mrs. Browning is a great loss to literature 

1 William Wetmore Story : And His Friends. Boston : Houghton, 
Mifflin and Co. 

S07 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

— the greatest poet among women. What 
energy and fire there was in that Uttle frame. 
Never did I see any one, whom the world hastened 
to crown, who had so httle vanity and so much 
pure humiUty." 

Isa Blagden went with Mr. Browning to Eng- 
land, where she was to have had a villa near Miss 
Cobbe ; but in the end she returns to Bellosguardo 
and is one of the narrowing circle to cheer 
Landor's latest days. 

During the last year of his life he collected and 
revised his poems that appear in the volume en- 
titled " Heroic Idylls," to which he prefixed a 
preface that runs : — 

" He who is within two paces of the ninetieth 
year may sit down and make no excuses ; he 
must be unpopular, he never tried to be much 
otherwise, he never contended with a contempo- 
rary, but walked alone on the far eastern uplands, 
meditating and remembering." 

The Florence on which Landor closed his eyes 
was the Florence of the Past and also of the Pres- 
ent. Not one charm of all its dead centuries has 
it ever lost. The spell of enchantment that 
brooded over the eleventh century still invests 

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Santa Croce, Florence. 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

the twentieth century. The ages only glorify 
this City Beautiful. 

The narrow, winding streets with their arcades, 
their overhanging loggias, the glow of color in 
niches and arch that surprises the eye, are 
thronged with invisible forms, and the irregular 
stone pavements echo to the tread of invisible 
footsteps. Every turn is invested with poetic 
legend ; every hour is filled with beauty. A 
morning atmosphere, clear as crystal, reveals the 
mountain ranges in tints of rose, purple, and 
azure, veined with colors that sparkle and change 
before the gaze like the flash of jewels. Again 
a wraith-like haze veils valley and mountains in 
the softest blue air, that half reveals and half con- 
ceals the towers and the ancient walls. Looking 
out on these and on the old church of the Car- 
mine, Landor might have said with Dante : 

" I lift mine eyes and all the windows blaze 
With forms of Saints and holy men who died 
Here martyred and hereafter glorified : 
And the great Rose upon its leaves displays 
Christ's triumph, and the angelic roundelays 
With splendor upon splendor multiplied ; 
And Beatrice again at Dante's side 
No more rebukes, but smiles her words of praise ; 
And then the organ sounds, and unseen choirs 
309 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

Sing the old Latin hymns of peace and love 
And benedictions of the Holy Christ ; 
And the melodious bells among the spires 
O'er all the housetops and through Heaven above 
Proclaim the elevation of the Host ! " 

During all the last dozen years or more of 
Landor's life he seemed to constantly anticipate 
death. As early as in 1857 when he arranged 
that collection of his poems that appears under 
the title of " Dry Sticks," he insisted on placing 
his name on the title-page as " the late " W. S. 
Landor. His publisher, Mr. Nichol of Edin- 
burgh wrote to him saying : — 

" I take the liberty of begging you to aUow 
me to make the title stand thus ; * Dry Sticks 
Faggoted by W. S. Landor,' and not, as you 
still continue to write it, the late W. S. Landor. 
It will sufficiently pain many when in God's 
good time you will be spoken of as ' the late ' ; 
and I think the expression would jar on the ear 
of all your friends as it does on mine." 

About that time Landor wrote to John 
Forster : — 

" Why cannot this swimming of the head 
carry me to the grave a little more rapidly? 

310 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

This is the only thing I now desire. I remem- 
ber faces and places, but their names I totally 
forget. Verses of the Odyssey and the Iliad, 
run perpetually in my mind, after the better 
part of a century, and there seems to be no room 
.for anything else." 

In his Ode to Southey, written at an earlier 
period than this, Landor had said : — 

*^' We hurry to the river we must cross, 

And swifter downward every footstep wends ; 
Happy who reach it ere they count the loss 
Of half their faculties and half their friends ! " 

The student of Landor cannot but note with 
some amusement, irreverent though it may seem, 
his habit of writing epitaphs for himself. The 
following Latin stanza is one of these : — 

" Ut sine censura, sine laude inscripta, sepulcro 
Sint patris ae matris nomina sola meo : 
At pura invidiae, sua gloria rara, poetae 
Incumbente rosa laurus obumbret humum." 

This half-poetic, half-melancholy attitude to- 
ward death was, however, in the very spirit of 
the age in which Landor lived. Mrs. Browning 
and other persons of exceptional development 
spiritually, escaped this tendency of the day to 

311 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

contemplate death in its mere physical aspect. 
The one grave defect running through the char- 
acter of Landor, or, as it might better be said, 
the one serious misfortune of his life, was his ina- 
bility to so comprehend the true nature of life as 
to see death in its just relation — merely one 
event in evolutionary progress. Religion as well 
as science is progressive in that each continually 
grasps larger truth ; and the closing years of the 
nineteenth century brought to bear on human 
life a wonderful quickening of perception regard- 
ing spiritual truth, and the power to receive anew, 
and realize with a far deeper significance, the 
revelation and the teachings of Jesus, the Christ. 
The twilight deepened into dusk. It was, in- 
deed, the twilight of the gods. The old man 
was but groping his way through the gathering 
shadows. All his old friends save Mr. Kirkup 
who continued to visit him, had vanished. Those 
whose footsteps had been, with his own, bathed 
in the dew of Parnassus, were all gone. Mr. 
Browning made constant friendly inquiries, but 
he could never look again upon Florence now 
that his "star," — the star that " opened its soul " 
to him, had vanished from earthly gaze. But 
Landor had his poems and his thoughts. His 

312 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

favorite classics were about him. On one night 
not long before his death the old man rang for 
his attendant about two o'clock in the morning, 
and insisted upon having the room lighted and 
the windows thrown open. He then asked for a 
pen ; he wrote a few lines of poetry, then, leaning 
back, said, *' I shall never write again. Put out 
the lights and draw the curtains." 

On the seventeenth of September, 1864, Landor 
was released from the worn-out physical body 
and entered on the life radiant amid that loveli- 
ness which eye hath not seen nor ear heard, nor 
hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive 
of its glory. 

" A night of memories and of sighs " 

And then the dawn of the Immortal Day. 

In the literary Valhalla Landor's fame rests 
secure. The defect of his work is its lack of spir- 
itual confidence. He had failed to lay hold on 
immortality with that abounding faith and exqui- 
site certainty of recognition which imparts to life 
the glow and energy of achievement, and the joy 
that no man taketh from another. In this defect 
he did not rise above the general environment of 
his age as those more spiritually developed were 

313 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

enabled to do, in ascending into the more joyous 
ethereal atmosphere. This was the misfortune of 
temperament rather than the fault of conscious 
intention. This loftier development of his noble 
intellectual powers awaited him farther on in 
the eternal progress. John Forster, his biog- 
rapher, admirably sums up Landor's life when 
he says: — 

" To the end we see him as it were unconquer- 
able. He keeps an unquailing aspect to the very 
close. But he is only unvanquished ; he is not 
the victor. . . . Greatness there was always ; a 
something of the heroic element which lifted him, 
in nearly all that he said and very much that he 
did, considerably above ordinary stature ; but 
never to be admitted or described without impor- 
tant drawbacks. What was wanting most, in his 
books and his life alike, was the submission to 
some kind of law. . . . But though he would not 
accept those rules of obedience without which no 
man can wisely govern either himself or others ; 
and though he lived far beyond the allotted term 
of life without discovering that all the world is 
wiser than any one man in the world ; his genius 
was yet in itself so commanding and consummate 

314 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

as to bring into play the nobler part of his char- 
acter only, and by this his influence wiU remain 
over others. . . . To refuse the recognition of 
any strength but one's own . . . and to rest all 
claim to magnanimity and honor on self-assertion 
rather than self-denial, cannot but be a grave 
fault in the conduct of life in modern times ; but 
shift it back into classic ages, and the heroes of 
Greece and Rome take visible shape once more." 

This last statement contains the key-note to 
Landor's character. He was essentially of clas- 
sic mould ; and his virtues and his defects were 
those seen in such high relief in any study of the 
Golden Age of Greece. 

A man, however, is entitled to be judged by 
his noblest moments. Landor's entire character 
was of the heroic quality. His liberal sympa- 
thies, his hatred of all tyranny and oppression, 
and his great tenderness of nature must endear 
him to all who appreciate the majesty of his 
genius as revealed in his work. 

In the little English cemetery, consecrated by 
the tomb of Elizabeth Barrett Browning whose 
earthly form was laid away in the marble de- 
signed by her friend. Sir Frederick Leighton ; 

315 



THE FLORENCE OF LANDOR 

near the graves of Isa Blagden, the TroUopes, 
and Theodore Parker, was the body of Landor 
laid. 

" O, the little birds sang east, and the little birds sang 
west. 

Toll slowly. 
And I smiled to think God's greatness flowed around our 

incompleteness, — 
Round our restlessness. His rest." 

The beautiful httle English cemetery just out- 
side the old walls of Florence will forever remain 
a shrine of poetic pilgrimage. A double line of 
the dark cypress trees motionless as statues, sur- 
round the spot ; the encircling mountain hnes 
tower above it from the near horizon and the 
golden Italian sunshine shimmers into a thousand 
opalescent lights and shadows over the tombs 
whose names suggest so much of the poetic 
vitality of the nineteenth century. The flat 
entablature of marble laid on Landor's grave 
bears only his name and the two dates — 1775- 
1864 — within whose limits the story of his 
life on earth was comprised, the most beauti- 
ful chapters of which were set in the scenic en- 
chantment of the Flower of all Cities and City 
of all Flowers. 

316 



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 

The Twilight of the Gods had faded into the 
Immortal Dawn of the Glory Everlasting. 

" And thou, his Florence, to thy trust 
Receive and keep. 
Keep safe his dedicated dust, 
, His sacred sleep. 

" So shall thy lovers, come from far. 
Mix with thy name 
As morning-star with evening-star 
His faultless fame." 



317 



INDEX 



iA 



INDEX 



^LETT, Mr., 42, 43. 

Academe, 59. 

Academy, Platonic, 92, 158, 160. 

Acciajuolo, Bishop Angelo, tomb 
of, 185. 

Acciajuolo, Niccolo, founder of 
the Certosa, 73, 183. 

AcropoUs, the, of Fsesulae, 254. 

" Adam and Eve," Diirer's paint- 
ing of, 171. 

" Adoration, The," 170. 

Affrico, 50. 

Ajax, 90. 

Albany, Duchess of, 183. 

Alberti, Leo Battista, 58. 

Alcott, Amos Bronson, 137. 

Aldrich, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas 
Bailey, 290. 

. lexander, 54. 

Alfieri, 239, 240. 

" Alfieri and Salomon," in Imagi- 
nary Conversations, 241, 255. 

" Allegory, An," picture in Pitti 
Palace, 169. 

Amici, Professor, 55. 

" Andrea of Hungary," 213, 237. 

" Annunciation, The," 171. 

Aquinas, St. Thomas, 165. 

Arezzo, 79, 81. 

Aristotle, 92. 

Assisi, 197. 

"Assumption, The," by Andrea 
del Sarto, 170. 

"Aurora Leigh," 99; Landor's 
praises of, 191, 196. 



Aylmer, John, Bishop of London, 

206. 
Aylmer, Lady, 206. 
Aylmer, Rose Whitworth, 201 ; 

Landor's meeting with, 201 ; 

impressions of, 202; charm of 

lyric on, 205 ; life of, 206 ; hair 

of, treasured by Landor, 207 ; 

journey to India, of, 209, 210 ; 

death of, 210 ; memories of, 

211, 281. 

Bagni di Lucca, 196. 
Bandini, Bernardo, 177. 
Barberini, Cardinal Francesco, 

150. 
Bartolommeo, Fra, 169, 173 ; por- 
trait of Savonarola, by, 165. 
" Beatrice Cenci," 137. 
Bell, John, 87. 
Bellosguardo, Heights of, 42, 74, 

99, 174. 
Benedictine order, the, 70. 
Bicci, Giovanni di, 176. 
Blagden, Isa, 24, 106, 136, 138, 

308, 316; letters of Mrs. 

Browning to, 131. 
Blessington, Lady, 24, 38, 46, 4T, 

48, 264, 265, 266, 287. 
Blessington, Lord, 47. 
Boboli Gardens, the, 103. 
Boccaccio, 25, 49, 50, 114, 225, 

226 ; appreciation of Landor 

for, 229. 
Boleyn, Anne, 225. 



21 



321 



INDEX 



Bonnat, Leon, 175. 

Botticelli, 67, 168, 169. 

Borgia, Lucrezia, 28. 

Brown, Charles Armitage, 50, 1 12. 

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 90, 
119, 120, 121, 131, 133, 136; 
Countess d'Ossoli characterized 
by, 127, 128 ; letters of, to Kate 
Field, 134, 135 ; " Pentameron," 
praised by, 249 ; Landor praised 
by, 282; death of, 198; tomb 
of, 315. 

Browning, Robert, 90, 119, 136, 
195, 198, 263, 303, 304, 312; 
hifluence of, on Landor, 189 ; 
dedication of " Luria " to Lan- 
dor, 190. 

Browning, Sarianna, 90. 

Brownings, the, 24, 47, 79, 105, 
157, 196, 197, 259, 281. 

Buonaventuri, Pietro, 12. 

Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, 305. 

Brunelleschi, 23, 83, 166, 167, 179. 

Bryant, William CuUen, visit of, 
to Florence, 106. 

Byron, Lord, his assaults on 
Southey, 29. 

Caesaks, the, palace of, 149. 

Campagna, the, 149. 

Campanile, the, 9. 

Canova, 149, 152. 

Capello, Bianca, 12. 

Careggi, 59. 

Carlyle, Thomas, 58. 

Cascine, the, 181. 

Casa Bello, 106, 107, 108. 

Casa Guidi, 105, 107, 129, 140, 

195, 262, 263, 303. 
Castle San Angelo, 151. 
Catania, University of, 132. 
Catharine of Siena, 296, 297, 298, 

299, 300, 301. 



Catullus, ^50. 

Cavour, Count, 22, 249. 

Cellini, Ben^^enuto, 90, 168. 

" Cenacolo, The " by Andrea del 
Sarto, 62. 

Certosa, Convent of, 73, 183, 184. 

Charles VIII. of France, 179. 

Chaterjii, Mohini, 17. 

Chavannes, Puvis de, 175. 

Chesterfield, Lord, 55, 229. 

Christine of Lorraine, 13. 

Church of San Alessandro, 254 ; 
Carmine, 303 ; Santa Croce, 71, 
72, 180, 181, 183 ; St. Domin- 
ico, 297, 298 ; San Francesco 
di Paola, 74, 186; San Lor- 
enzo, 64, 175, 176 ; San Miniato, 
43, 64, 69, 72 ; Santa Maria 
Novella, 19, 194, 195 ; San Mar- 
tino a Mensola, 62, 63 ; St. 
Peter's, 149 ; San Spirito, 53, 
64, 174, 180. 

Cicero, 254. 

Cimabue, 69, 194. 

City of the Leaning Tower, 
the, 3. 

Clement VII., 177. 

Clement, XIII., tomb of, 149. 

"Cleopatra," Guido's picture of, 
170; William Wetmore Story's 
poem, 156 ; his statue of, 151. 

Coates, Florence Earle, quoted, 
204. 

Cobbe, Frances Power, 24 ; visit 
of to Florence, 131 ; brilliant 
circle of, 136. 

Coleman, Charles Caryll, portrait 
of Landor by, 259. 

" Conspiracy of Catullus," picture 
by Salvator Rosa, 170. 

" Conversation between Galileo, 
Milton, and a Dominican," 239. 

" Conversations in a Studio," 157. 



322 



INDEX 



Cook, Henrietta, sister of Mrs. 
Browning, 135. 

Copernican system, the, of Gali- 
leo, 14. 

Cornwall, Barry, 189. 

Corson, Dr. Hiram, quoted, 145. 

Cosimo il Vecchio, 10, 11, 12, 13, 
. 14, 26, 86, 93, 177. 

Cosimo, Piero di, 75. 
' " Count Julian," 28, 33, 

Cranch, Mr. and Mrs. Christopher 
Pearse, 193. 

Cushman, Charlotte, 157. 

Daix' Ongaro, Francesco, 136. 

" Dance of the Pleiades, The," 
154. 

Dante, 19, 20, 108, 113, 182, 291, 
309 ; Mr. Kirkup's manuscript 
poems of, 110; death-mask of, 
110; fresco portrait of, 110; 
monument to, 180. 

" Dante and Beatrice," in " Im- 
aginary Conversations," 241. 

" Dancing Mercury, The," of 
Giovanni da Bologna, 194. 

" David," Michael Angelo's statue 
of, 72 ; Donatello's statue of, 
194. 

Da Vinci, Leonardo, 175. 

" Death of Clytemnestra, The," 
236. 

" Decameron, The," 225. 

De Quincey, Thomas, 32. 

De Vere, Aubrey, quoted by 
Landor, 267 et seq. 

Dickens, Charles, 190, 283 ; Fors- 
ter's allusion to letter of, 124, 
125 ; Landor's words on, 214. 

" Divine Comedy, The," 115. 

Dolci, Carlo, 168. 

Donatello, work of, 91, 176. 

Dowden, Edward, 248. 



" Dry Sticks," 310. 

Dudley, Sir Robert, palace of, 10» 

16; arrival in Florence of, 11 ; 

reception of, by Cosimo II., 

13 ; death of, 15 ; burial-place 

of, 15. 
Duomo, the, Hawthorne's words 

on, 107. 
Dupre, Giovanni, 176, 181. 

Fames, Emma (see Story). 

" Ecce Homo," painting by Fra 
Bartolommeo, 170. 

Eldridge, Emeline {see Story). 

Eleanora, Duchess of Toledo, 
168 ; portrait of, 172. 

Eliot, George (pseud. Mary Ann 
Evans Cross), 24, 90 ; impres- 
sions of Fiesole, 83 ; visits Trol- 
lope, 84 ; art criticisms of, 90 ; 
quoted, 8, 96, 97, 98 ; Palazzo 
Pitti characterized by, 167. 

Elizabeth, Queen, 11. 

"Elizabeth and Burleigh" in 
" Imaginary Conversations," 
237. 

Emerson, Ralph "Waldo, 24, 47 ; 
238, 253 ; Duomo praised by, 
57 ; letter of to Landor, 57 ; 
his meeting with Landor, 53, 
54, 55, 238, 253. 

Esti, Leonora di, 240. 

" Estrangement," 156. 

Everett, Edward, Story's statue 
of, 155. 

" Examination of William Shake- 
speare for Deer-Stealing," 48. 

"Fates Gathering in the Stars, 

The," 154. 
Ferdinand, King of Naples, 178. 
Ferrucci, Francesco, 10, 12, 13. 
Festival of Corpus Domini, 195. 



323 



INDEX 



Field, Eliza, nU Riddle (Mrs. 
Joseph M.), 135. 

Field, Kate, 24, 30, 35, 284 ; let- 
ters to, 134 ; quotations from, 
188, 207, 259, 262, 276, 277; 
letter of Landor to, 274 ; manu- 
scripts of, 280. 

Fiesole, 3, 'ib, 68. 

Fiske, Professor Daniel WUlard, 
restoration of Villa Landor by, 
289 ; hospitality of, 290 ; con- 
versation of, 290 ; Dante and 
Petrarca collections of, 291, 
292, 293 ; gift of, to Cornell, 
294 ; scholarly culture of, 294, 
295 ; death of, 291. 

Florence, Trollope's History of, 
138. 

Forster, John, 129, 283, 284; 
" The Pentameron " character- 
ized by, 114 ; lyric of Landor 's 
appreciated by, 205 ; quotations 
from, 237, 238, 251, 252, 253; 
Landor's life appraised by, 314, 
315. 

Fra Angelico, San Marco immor- 
talized by, 23 ; ineffable beauty 
of works of, 160. 

Franklin, Benjamin, 240. 

Fra Girolamo, 164. 

French Revolution, the, 35. 

Fuller, Margaret, Countess d'Os- 
soli {see Ossoh). 

Galileo, 14, 26, 241 ; called to 
Florence by Cosimo, 13 ; tradi- 

I ditions of, 42 ; tower of, 64 ; 
Herschel's appreciation of, 67. 

Garibaldi, 249 ; tablet to, 183. 

" Gebir," 28, 31, 32, 277. 

Ghirlandajo, 23. 

Gibson, John, his bust of Landor, 
260. 



*' Ginevra," Da Vinci's picture of, 
171. 

Giotto, 69, 181 ; tower of, 83. 

"Girlhood of Catherine de' Me- 
dici, The," 138. 

Giulio, Cardinal, %'i. 

Giovanna di Napoli, 236. 

Giovanni da Bologna, &Q. 

Giovanna, Prince, 12. 

Goddi, grand staircase of, in the 
Bargello, 193. 

Graves-Sawle, Lady, nie Payn- 
ter, 211, 215; portrait of, 206, 
209 ; marriage of, 214 ; golden 
wedding of, 216, 217. 

Greenough, Horatio, 47, 53, 54. 

Gregory IX., Pope, 181. 

Gualberto, Giovanni, miracle ap- 
pears to, 70 ; crucifix of, 72 ; 
relics of, 78. 

Hallam, Henry, 59. 

Hardy, Thomas, 85. 

Hare, Francis, 24, 31, 46. 

Hare, Julius, 24, 31, 46, 130. 

Hawthorne, Julian, letter of. 111, 
112. 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 24, 99, 
105, 106, 107, 108, 157 ; art im- 
pressions of, 89 ; Mr. Story's 
statue of Cleopatra interpreted 
by, 151; BeUosguardo described 
by, 187. 

Hazlitt, William, 112. 

" He and She, a Poet's Portfolio," 
156. 

" Heroic Idylls," 275, 308. 

Herschel, Sir John, 6^^ 67. 

Hillard, George S., Browning's 
conversation described by, 140. 

" Holy Family, The," Raphael's 
picture of, 170 ; Andrea del 
Sarto's picture of, 172. 



324 



INDEX 



Homer, Landor's veneration of, 
231, 275. 

Horace, 52, 240, 271. 

Hosmer, Harriet, characteriza- 
tion of by Miss Cobbe, 137. 

Hutton, R. H., George EKot's 
letter to, 85. 

Hunt, Leigh, 24, 25, 42, 46, 50, 
. 51, 52, 112, 189. 

" Ianthe," 207, 208. 

" Idler in France, The," 266, 

"Idler in Italy, The," 266. 

" Imaginary Conversations," 28, 

31, 32, 53, 57, 98, 99, 221, 222, 

240, 289. 
" Infant Bacchus, The," 155. 
" Italian Note Books, The," 99. 
Inghs, Sir Robert Harry, 130. 

James, Henry, 192. 

Jameson, Mrs. Anna, 24, 62, 70, 
140. 

•' Jane Eyre," 195. 

Janiculum, the, 151. 

Jarves, James Jackson, 157, 

"Jerusalem in Her Desolation," 
Mr. Story's sculpture of, 155. 

John of Bologna, 55. 

"Judith and Holofernes," the, of 
Donatello, 91, 

JuUus II., Pope, Raphael's por- 
trait of, 170. 

Keats, John, 78, 239. 
Kenilworth, 16. 
Kenyon, Frederick, 131. 
Kenyon, John, 24, 46, 79; Fors- 

ter's characterization of 129. 
Kinney, Mrs. Elizabeth Coates, 

123. 
Kirkup, Seymour, 24, 108, 117, 

216, 306, 312; Hawthorne's de- 



scription of, 109 ; antique col- 
lections of, 110, 111 ; reminis- 
cences of, 115, 116. 
Kossuth, Louis, 125, 249 ; letter 
of, to Landor, 278, 279. 

" La Beata," 138. 

" La Bella," 172, 

" La Donna Velata," 170, 172. 

Lamb, Charles, 249. 

Landino, 26, 58. 

Landor, Julia, n4e ThuilUer (Mrs. 
Walter Savage Landor), 116. 

Landor, Walter Savage, 3, 4, 5, 
23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30 ; birth of, 
31 ; parentage of, 31, 34 ; Spain 
visited by, 36, 38 ; villa ac- 
quired by, 42 ; allusion of 
Emerson to, 56 ; marriage of, 
116 ; Southey overrated by, 57, 
113, 136, 158, 159 ; art worship 
of, 188 ; Browning praised by, 
190, 191 ; Rose Aylmer met 
by, 201, 202, 203, 221, 222; 
art criticism of, 232 ; worship 
of for Shakespeare, 235 ; pov- 
erty of, 244 ; Kate Field's 
characterization of, 246, 247, 
253, 255, 256, 259, 275 ; poetic 
appreciations of, 277 ; letter of 
to Kossuth, 279, 280 ; visit of 
to the Storys, 281, 282 ; Mrs. 
Browning's poems praised by, 
284; medallion head of, 290; 
letter of to Forster, 310 ; death 
of 313; grave of, 316. 

Lang, Andrew, 209. 

" Last Fruit," 263. 

Laurentian Library, the, 85, 86. 

Leader, Temple, 61. 

Leighton, Sir Frederick, 24, 315. 

" Lenore," 206. 

Lewes, George Henry, 24, 84. 



325 



INDEX 



Lippi, Filippo, 176. 
Loggia de' Lanzi, 90. 
Longfellow, Henry "Wadsworth, 

49. 
Lorenzo il Magnifico, 20, 26, 86, 

256 ; villa of, 58 ; death of, 9, 

93 ; legend of, 95 ; incident of, 

in gardens of San Marco, 161. 
LoweU, James Russell, 151, 195 ; 

words of, on Dante, 294. 
Luca della Robbia, important 

work of, 74. 
Lytton, Lord, (jaseud., Owen 

Meredith), 196. 

Machiavelu, Bernardo, 49, 51, 

61, 183. 
" Madonna Addolorata," 181. 
"Madonna del Baldacchino," 

the, 173. 
" Madonna dell' Impruneta," 

shrine of, 73. 
" Madonna of the Roses," 168. 
" Madonna della Seggiola," 170, 

173. 
" Magdalen, The," Perugino's 

picture of 171. 
Magliabicchiana Library, 85. 
" Malesherbes " in "Imaginary 

Conversations," 223, 224, 225. 
Manning, Rev. Dr., afterward 

Cardinal, 305. 
" Marble Faun, The," 151, 152. 
Maria Maddalena, 15. 
Marie, Queen of Henri IV. of 

France, 12. 
"Marriage of St. Catherine, 

The," 170, 172. 
Marsh, George P., 140. 
Massinger, Philip, 54. 
Mazzini, Giuseppe, tablet to, 183 ; 

Landor's admiration for, 249. 
Medea, statue of, 155. 



Medici, Anna Maria, de', 175. 

Medici, Cosimo de', 20. 

Medici, Piero de', 72. 

Medici, Chapel of the, 13, 87. 

Metcalfe, Sir Theophilus, 210. 

Michael Angelo Buonarotti, 35, 
41; birthplace of, 51 ; referred 
to by Landor, 56 ; in group of 
the Academe, 58, 60 ; " David " 
of, 72 ; Laurentian Library de- 
signed by, 85 ; Medicean stat- 
ues of, 87 ; power of, 89 ; " The 
Three Fates " of, 171 ; Vasari's 
monument to, 182. 

Millais, Sir John, 175. 

Milton, 14, 26, 31, 32, 33, 34., 
42, 45, 79, 206, 284 ; Landor's 
praise of, 286. 

" Milton in Italy," 287. 

Mirandola, Giovanni Picodella, 
58, 160, 256 ; biography of, 92 ; 
visit of to Lorenzo il MagnificOt 
93. 

Montepulciana, Fra Francesco 
de, 181. 

Mount-Edgcombe, Earl of, 217. 

Mount Morello, 73. 

Murillo, Madonna of, 170. 

Napoleon, 35, 36. 
Nelh, Bartolommeo, 51. 
Neptune, fountain of, 91. 
Nicino, Marsilio, 58. 
Northumberland, Duke of, 10, 12. 
Norton, Prof. Charles Eliot, 307. 

" Ode to Southey," 311. 

" Odyssey, The," 275, 306. 

Orcagna, 90. 

Ossini, Clarice, 178. 

Ossoli, Margaret, nie Fuller, 
Coimtess d' Ossoli, 24 ; quoted 
from, 35; sojourn in Florence 



326 



INDEX 



of, 126, 127; Mrs. Browning's 
comment on, 127, 128 ; strange 
incident of, 128 ; curious proph- 
ecy regarding, 128; marriage 
of, 157 ; literary comparison of, 
230. 
Ovid, 52. 

P^sTUM, ruined temples at, 47. 

Palazzo, Berti, 25 ; Barbe- 

rini, 149, 150 ; Buondel- 

morte, 10 ; Medici, 166 ; 

Odeschalchi, 28 ; Pas- 

serina, 24 ; Pitti, 11, 166 ; 

Podesta, 193 ; Strozzi, 

10, 99 ; Vecchio, 11, 63, 90. 

"Pallas and the Centaur," by 
BotticeUi, 169. 

Palmieri, Matteo, 67. 

Paolo and Francesca, 74. 

" Paracelsus," 189. 

Paris, 5, 35. 

Parker, Theodore, 24, 137, 316. 

Parsons, Dr. Thomas W., 193. 

" Pascarel," 64. 

Paynter, Mrs., n4e Aylmer, 206. 

" Pauline," 284. 

Peabody, EUzabeth, 125. 

Peabody, George, statue of, 155. 

"Pentameron, The," 113; Mrs. 
Browning's praises of, 250. 

"Pericles and Aspasia," 31, 230, 
231, 285 ; Mrs. Browning's ver- 
dict on, 254. 

" Perseus," the, of Cellini, 90. 

Perugino, 55, 176. 

Peruzzi, Mme. Edith, n4e Story, 
77. 

Petrarca, 114, 225, 226, 227, 229 ; 
collective works of, 291. 

Piazza del Duomo, 180 ; In- 

dipendenza, 84 ; Santa 

Maria Novella, 126, 195 ; 



della Signoria, 91 ; Trinita, 

9 ; del Tritone, 149. 

Pitti, Luca, 166, 167. 

" Plato and Diogenes," 32. 

Platonic Academy of Florence, 

the, 26, 158. 
Pohziano, 58, 60, 160. 
Polybius, 26. 
Ponte Vecchio, 107. 
Powers, Hiram, 24, 105. 
Prinsep, Val, 305. 
" Proserpine," bust of, by Hiram 

Powers, 105. 
"Puck," by Harriet Hosmer, 

137. 
Pulsky, Count, 125. 

" Quarterly Review, The," 32. 

Rachel, 38. 

Raphael, 35, 55, 62, 170, 173, 
175. 

Renan, Ernest, 92. 

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 235. 

Ricci, his monument to Dante, 
182. 

" Roba di Roma," 155, 157. 

" Rosamunda," the first Italian 
tragedy, 62. 

" Romola," 84, 85, 95, 96, 98, 99. 

Rome, 68. 

Rontgen ray, the, 5. 

RosseUina, 176. « 

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 305. 

Rousseau (in " Imaginary Con- 
versations "), 223, 224, 225. 

Rubens, 111 ; portrait of, 173. 

RuceUai, Bernardo, 61. 

Rucellai, Giovanni, 62. 

RuceUai, the, 11, 17, 62. 

Ruskin, John, 68. 

Russell, Sir Henry and Lady, 
209, 210. 



327 



INDEX 



Saint Andrew, 62, 63 ; 

Romolo, 60 ; Benedict, 75 ; 

Francis, meeting of, with 

Saint Benedict, 75 ; John, 

145 ; Louis, statue of, 182 ; 

Ornatus, 62 ; Ber- 
nardino, 182. 

" Salle des Illusions," 6, 7. 

Sallust, 26. 

Salotto di Clement VIL, 23. 

Salvator Rosa, 170. 

Salvini, Tommaso, visit of, to 
Story, 78. 

San Baldassare, convent of, 50. 

San Dominico, the hamlet of, 25. 

San Marco, 23, 95, 160, 161, 162, 
164. 

San Miniato, 42, 63. 

San Salvi, convent of, 62, 

Santa Trinita al Monte, gardens 
of, 14. 

Sarto, Andrea del, 170, 171. 

" Saul," Story's statue of, 155. 

Savonarola, Fra Girolamo, 19, 23, 
91, 94, 95, 98, 158, 159, 165; 
summons of, to Lorenzo's death- 
bed, 93, 176; words of, 161, 
162, 163, 164; statue of, 
180. 

" Savonarola e il Priori di San 
Marco," 158. 

" Search after Proserpine, The," 
by Aubrey De Vere, 269. 

Settignano, 49, 62. 

Shakespeare, 192, 221, 222, 272, 
284. 

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 32, 34, 
78, 196, 249, 284, 285. 

" Sibyl, The," by Story, 155. 

Sidney, Sir Philip, in " Imagi- 
nary Conversations," 241. 

Siena, 296, 300, 302. 

Simonides, 250. 



Sistine Chapel, the, 60. 

Sixtus IV., Pope, 178. 

" Sleeping Faun, The," by Har- 
riet Hosmer, 137. 

Smith, Professor and Mrs. Gold- 
win, 290. 

Sodoma, the frescoes of, 300. 

Soderini, Niccolo, 167. 

Somerville, Mrs., 24. 

Sophocles, 260. 

" Soul's Tragedy, A," 191. 

Southey, 28, 29, 30, 32, 56, 57, 
269. 

Southeys, the, 36. 

Southey and Porson, in " Imagi- 
nary Conversations," 228, 229. 

Spini, The, 10. 

Story, Emeline, n4e Eldridge 
(Mrs. William Wetmore), 148. 

Story, Emma, nie Eames (Mrs. 
Julian), 158. 

Story, Joseph, 148, 154 ; statue 
of, 155. 

Story, Julian, 158. 

Story, Waldo, 158. 

Story, William Wetmore, 76, 77, 
78, 146 ; characterization of 
Hawthorne, 106 ; personal ap- 
pearance described by Haw- 
thorne, 152 ; home of, 148, 149 ; 
friends of, 153 ; art of, 153, 
154 ; literary work of, 155, 156 ; 
friendship of, with Browning, 

157, 158 ; letter of, to Lowell, 
195. 

Storys, the, 24, 150, 151, 157, 

158, 192, 193, 195, 196, 197, 
259. 

Stowe, Harriet, n4e Beecher, 24, 
128 ; last words of, to Mrs. 
Browning, 129. 

Strozzi, Filippo, Trollope's Life of, 
138. 



328 



INDEX 



Strozzi, Giovanni Battisi^, 88. 

Sumner, Charles, 57. 

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 
24 ; quotation from, 171 ; Lan- 
dor praised by, 250, 251 ; his 
visit to Landor, 306 ; his verses 
to the memory of Landor, 
307. 

Symonds, John Addington, 58, 
" 59, 300. V 

Tadema, Alma, 175. 

Tasso, 240. 

Taylor, O. J., 206. 

Tennyson, Alfred, 124. 

Tennyson, Frederic, 24, 123, 
137. 

Thackeray, William Makepeace, 
24, 124, 158. 

Theosophy, Florentine, Society 
of, 16. 

Thuillier, Julia, 36 (see Landor). 

Titian, 170. 

Toledo, Duchessa Eleonora di, 
11, 12, 167. 

Tornabuoni, Mona Lucrezia, 86, 
177. 

Torra del Gullo, 14, 64, 66. 

TroUope, Anthony, 138. 

Trollope, Theodosia, n4e Gar- 
row (Mrs. Thomas Adolphus), 
216. 

TroUope, Thomas Adolphus, 
villa of, 84, 99, 107, 139 ; quota- 
tion from, 117, 118, 119 ; words 
of, 138. 

Trollopes, the, 136. 

Tully, 26. 

" Tuscan Sculptors," 184. 

Uffizi, gallery of, 11, 175, 

180. 
" Uncle Tom's Cabin," 122. 



Urban VIIL, 149, ISO. 

Vaixombrosa, 19, 45, 50, 69, 71, 
76, 79. 80. 

Varchi, Benedetto, 182. 

Vasari, 182. 

Vatican, the, 173. 

Vedder, Elihu, 153 ; genius of, 
154 ; spiritual mysteries inter- 
preted by, 154. 

Verrocchio, 176. 

Very, Jones, 193. 

Villa Alberti, 281 ; Brichieri, 130, 
136 ; Castello di Vincigliata, 
61, 62 ; Gherardesca, 25 ; Lan- 
dor, 26, 41, 52, 75, 202, 289, 
294 ; Lago di Vallombrosa, 77, 
78, Ludovisi, 149 ; Medici, 95 ; 
Mont-Auto, 130 ; Palmieri, 67 ; 
Trollope, 84. 

Via Tornabuoni, 10 ; della Miseri- 
cordia, 126 ; della VignaNuova, 
10. 

Victor Emmanuel, 22. 

Victoria, Queen, visit of, to 
Florence, 68. 

ViUari, Linda, n4e White (Mme. 
Pasquale), 24, 136, 138. 

ViUari, Prof. Pasquale, 160, 161. 

Villari, Senatore, 123. 

" Vision of Ezekiel," 169. 

Vittoria Colonna, in " Imaginary 
Conversations," 233, 234. 

Voltaire, 55, 224, 225. 

"Warrior, The," by Salvator 
Rosa, 170. 

Washington, 55, 240. 

Watts, George Frederic, 175. 

Webster, Daniel, 283. 

WUlis, Nathaniel Parker, 24 ; 
visit of, to Landor, 48 ; bril- 
liant life of, 48. 



329 



INDEX 



Wilson, Mrs. Browning's maid, 

303. 
Wheeler, Stephen, 209. 
White, Linda (see Villari). 
Whitman, Walt, 38. 



Wordsworth, William, 29, 34, 55, 

190, 249. 
Wright, J. A., 88, 89. 

Zenobia, by Harriet Hosmer, 137. 



330 



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